British Silent Cinema and the Great War

British Silent Cinema and the Great War Also by Michael Hammond THE BIG SHOW: BRITISH CINEMA CULTURE AND THE GREAT WA...

Author: Michael Williams | Michael Hammond (editors)

201 downloads 3082 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

British Silent Cinema and the Great War

Also by Michael Hammond THE BIG SHOW: BRITISH CINEMA CULTURE AND THE GREAT WAR THE CONTEMPORARY TELEVISION SERIES (co-edited with Lucy Mazdon) CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CINEMA (co-edited with Linda Ruth Williams) Also by Michael Williams IVOR NOVELLO: SCREEN IDOL

British Silent Cinema and the Great War Edited by

Michael Hammond and

Michael Williams

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Michael Hammond and Michael Williams 2011 Individual chapters © Contributors 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–29262–8 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data British silent cinema and The Great War/edited by Michael Hammond, Michael Williams. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–29262–8 (hardback) 1. World War, 1914–1918—Motion pictures and the war. 2. Silent films—Great Britain—History and criticism. 3. Historical films—Great Britain—History and criticism. 4. Motion pictures—Great Britain— History—20th century. I. Hammond, Michael, 1954– II. Williams, Michael, 1971– D522.23.B75 2011 791.43’63582821—dc22 2011016926 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Notes on Contributors

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

1.

Goodbye to All That or Business as Usual? History and Memory of the Great War in British Cinema Michael Hammond and Michael Williams

1

Part I: The War 2.

3.

The Battle of the Somme (1916): An Industrial Process Film that ‘Wounds the Heart’ Michael Hammond

19

British and Colonial: What the Company Did in the Great War Gerry Turvey

39

4.

‘Improper Practices’ in Great War British Cinemas Paul Moody

49

5.

‘Shells, Shots and Shrapnel’: Picturegoer Goes to War Jane Bryan

64

Part II: Aftermath: Memory and Memorial 6.

‘A Victory and a Defeat as Glorious as a Victory’: The Battles of the Coronel and Falkland Islands (Walter Summers, 1927) Amy Sargeant

7.

Remembering the War in 1920s British Cinema Christine Gledhill

8.

Remembrance, Re-membering and Recollection: Walter Summers and the British War Film of the 1920s Lawrence Napper

v

79 94

109

vi

Contents

9. ‘Fire, Blood and Steel’: Memory and Spectacle in The Guns of Loos (Sinclair Hill, 1928) Michael Williams

118

Part III: Notes from the Archive 10. Hello to All This: Music, Memory and Revisiting the Great War Neil Brand

137

11. The Dead, Battlefield Burials and the Unveiling of War Memorials in Films of the Great War Era Toby Haggith

145

12. Anticipating the Blitz Spirit in First World War Propaganda Film: Evidence in the Imperial War Museum Archive Roger Smither

160

13. ‘How Shall We Look Again’? Revisiting the Archive in British Silent Film and the Great War Bryony Dixon and Laraine Porter

170

References

186

Index

192

List of Illustrations Cover image from Journey’s End (James Whale, 1930). Photograph courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs. Still image from Sir Douglas Haig’s Great Push, a special magazine published to coincide with the release of The Battle of the Somme. Reproduced here are the titles taken from the film.

4

Jameson Thomas as Brown in Poppies of Flanders (Arthur Maude, 1927). Photograph courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs.

13

The industrial process of battle. From Sir Douglas Haig’s Great Push, published with the release of The Battle of the Somme.

26

Warwickshires have dinner the night before the battle. A shot of soldiers’ faces addressed to local audiences back home. This image typifies the primary form of address of the film. From Sir Douglas Haig’s Great Push.

30

King George V on the front cover of Pictures and the Picturegoer (August 22 1914).

65

Cartoon depicting a war correspondent’s dream of filming at the front line (Pictures and the Picturegoer, October 17 1914).

67

Naval cadets saluting ships in The Battles of the Coronel and Falkland Islands (Walter Summers, 1927). Photograph courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs.

81

Jameson Thomas in Blighty. Photograph courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs.

96

A young Herbert Wilcox, director of Dawn and producer of The Wonderful Story. Photograph courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs.

97

The Divisonal Baths, Ypres: The Story of the Immortal Salient (Walter Summers, 1925). Photograph courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs.

114

vii

viii

List of Illustrations

Heroic action in Ypres: The Story of the Immortal Salient. Photograph courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs.

117

Revels below stairs before leaving for the Front in The Guns of Loos. Photograph courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs.

122

A blind John Grimlaw (Henry Victor) returns from the front in The Guns of Loos (Sinclair Hill, 1928). Photograph courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs.

129

Robin Villiers (Godfrey Winn) shakes hands with David Marshall (Jameson Thomas) in Blighty (Adrian Brunel, 1927). Photograph courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs.

141

The ceremonies promoted the military ethos among the young. Unveiling of the Ystalyfera War Memorial, Saturday December 16th 1922 (Imperial War Museum film number MGH 3720; still image number IWM FLM 3205). Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London.

150

The concrete cross. Unveiling of the Rawmarsh & Parkgate War Memorial by Col. Stephen Rhodes DSO, Sunday 3rd June 1928 (Imperial War Museum film number MGH 3598; still image number IWM FLM 3931). Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London. 154 A still from the film Visit of HRH the Prince of Wales to Ebbw Vale, February 21st 1918 (Imperial War Museum film number IWM 170; still image number IWM FLM 1067). Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London.

164

A still from the 1917 film A Day in the Life of a Munition Worker (Imperial War Museum film number IWM 510; still image number IWM FLM 2066). Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London.

167

Sybil Thorndike as Edith Cavell in Dawn (Herbert Wilcox, 1928). Photograph courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs.

171

‘Old Bill’ (Syd Chaplin) and his two chums in The Better ‘Ole (Charles Reisner, 1926). Photograph courtesy of BFI Stills, Posters and Designs.

180

Notes on Contributors Neil Brand is best known as one of the world’s finest silent film accompanists. He has written extensively on the First World War in plays and essays, as well as articles on film music and the book Dramatic Notes: Foregrounding Music in the Dramatic Experience (1998). Jane Bryan wrote her PhD thesis on British film fan magazines of the 1910s at the University of East Anglia, where she has also taught silent cinema history and worked on the British Cinema History Research Project. Bryony Dixon is a curator at the BFI National Archive with a specialism in silent film. She has researched and written on many aspects of early and silent film and co-directs the annual British Silent Film Festival, as well as programming for a variety of film festivals and events worldwide. Christine Gledhill is Visiting Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Sunderland. She has published extensively on feminist film criticism, melodrama and British cinema, including Reframing British Cinema, 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion (BFI, 2003). Toby Haggith joined the Imperial War Museum’s Film Department in 1988, where for the last ten years he has been head of non-commercial access and responsible for devising the Public Film Show programme in the cinema. He is now a Senior Curator in the Department of Research. He has a PhD in Social History from the University of Warwick. Michael Hammond is Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Southampton. He has published widely on British cinema and Hollywood cinema. He is the author of The Big Show: British Cinema Culture in The Great War (Exeter University Press, 2006). He is presently working on a British Academy-funded project, ‘The After Image of the Great War in Hollywood, 1919–1939’. Paul Moody is completing a PhD at the London School of Economics on national identity in pre-Second World War British cinema. ix

x

Notes on Contributors

He teaches Film and Television History for the Open University and delivers practical video and audio training for Brunel University’s Journalism Department. Lawrence Napper is a lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College, London. His book British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years was published by the University of Exeter Press in 2009. Laraine Porter is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at De Montfort University and also teaches at University of Leicester. She is the co-ordinator of the British Silent Cinema Festival held annually in Leicester, Nottingham or London and has co-edited five previous volumes on silent British cinema that have arisen from the festivals. Amy Sargeant is Reader in Film at the University of Warwick. She has written extensively on British silent and sound cinema. Roger Smither worked at the Imperial War Museum for 40 years, and was Keeper of its Film and Video Archive from 1990 until his retirement in 2010; also of its Photograph Archive from 2002. He has written and edited a number of books and articles, including the Kraszna-Krausz Award-winning ‘This Film Is Dangerous: A Celebration of Nitrate Film’ (FIAF, 2002). Gerry Turvey was formerly a lecturer in Film Studies in higher education. He is a trustee of the Phoenix Cinema, North London, and his book The Phoenix Cinema: A Century of Film in East Finchley was published by the Phoenix Cinema Trust in 2010. Michael Williams is a Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Southampton. His monograph Ivor Novello: Screen Idol was published by the BFI in 2003. Other work includes writing on landscape and sexuality in British cinema; Belgian filmmaker Bavo Defurne; film adaptations of The Talented Mr. Ripley; and Anton Walbrook. He is currently writing a book on film stardom, myth and classicism.

Acknowledgements As always with a collaborative project such as this, thanks are due to a number of people. When we set out to bring together this volume, we were fortunate to have at our disposal the proceeds from the Silent British Film Festival held in 2004, which focused on the Great War. That endeavour and the entire Festival Series that has been ongoing since 1998 have been the result of the efforts of the British Silent Cinema Group. This has been spearheaded by the tireless efforts of Laraine Porter at DeMontfort University and Bryony Dixon at the British Film Institute. Often in the face of considerable odds, they have been able to sustain this festival and keep the flame of British silent cinema alive. We, and the institutions they work for, owe them a distinct debt of gratitude. We would also like to thank the contributors, many of whom have also been regular supporters and participant in the festival over the last decade. We owe a special thanks to Neil Brand, whose musical accompaniment to the films is matched only by his in-depth knowledge and insight into British film history of this period. Overseeing these efforts and offering much needed support was Ian Christie, whose commitment to bringing to the attention of the public the value of early and silent cinema has been stalwart. There were a number of contributions to the 2004 Festival that we were unable to include but who added immensely to our own understanding of the role of the Great War in British and European film history. For this we would like to thank Daniel Biltereyst, Simon Brown, Jude Cowan, Jan Anders Diesen, Leen Engelen, Tony Fletcher, Frank Scheide, Claudia Sternberg, Roel Vande Winkel and David Williams. We would like to thank Christabel Scaife, Felicity Plester and Catherine Mitchell at Palgrave for being so supportive in helping us to bring this project to fruition. Thanks finally to Toby Haggith and Roger Smither at the IWM for their help in gaining access to the film collection there, as well as to the staff at BFI Stills, Posters and Designs. We hope that through the effort of all these people we have been able to contribute to a deeper understanding of the representation of the Great War in British silent cinema and in turn of the role of cinema in the ever-changing memory of that tragic event. xi

This page intentionally left blank

1 Goodbye to All That or Business as Usual? History and Memory of the Great War in British Cinema Michael Hammond and Michael Williams

We come to the writing of this book at the moment that the Great War passes from living memory. With the death of Claude Choules in May 2011, the last known surviving combat veteran of that war, it is more than ever the realm of the archive to which we must turn in search of witness. Yet even with almost a century passed since the armistice, few events remain so deeply scored into the popular imagination; as one newspaper reflected: ‘the first world war is still a live and raw memory, though today almost none of us lived through it’.1 In the nine decades since the war’s end, the cinema, along with television and now the internet, has been central in disseminating, and therefore shaping, the image of the Great War in popular memory. This book provides important insights into the role that British silent cinema played in this, for it is the silent cinema that set out the ‘landscape’ of images and narratives during the war and in the subsequent decade. Those images and narratives were, as we shall see here, at once drawing on pre-war traditions established by the new media of film and devising new strategies of story telling and image making that the cataclysmic nature of the war demanded. The issue during the war was how to represent it; following the war it was how to remember it. There are two questions at the heart of studying the role of the Great War in British film culture between 1914 and the coming of sound. The first is one that attends any study of an art form during a particular period or in relation to a larger historical event: ‘What role did the event, in this case the Great War, play in the development of cinema aesthetically and as a central cultural force?’ The second looks outward from the period of the War itself to ask (to borrow 1

2 British Silent Cinema and the Great War

from Paul Fussell): ‘What impact did British cinema have in the construction of the Great War in modern memory?’2 These two questions are addressed in various ways by the essays in this volume and also stand in a kind of conversational relationship. The ‘cultural force’ of the first question refers to the rapid rise of cinema as a socially recognized form of popular entertainment in the years 1914–29, while the second question speaks to that significant figure of expansion as evidence of how cinema became a powerful contributor to the shaping of the public memory of the war. In exploring these questions we have divided this collection into three sections. Part One, ‘The War’, focuses on the years 1914–18 to examine the impact of the war on film production and exhibition practices in Britain, as well as aspects of the experience of audiences, whether cinema going in London, or reading film fan magazines. Part Two, ‘Aftermath: Memory and Memorial’, moves discussion on to the 1920s in exploring the complex ways in which the war was remembered and modulated for this post-war decade. Finally, this collection presents the unique insights of leading figures involved in preserving and presenting the Great War to contemporary audiences through the nation’s film collections. Part Three, ‘Notes from the Archive’, thus presents viewpoints, both historical and personal, of film historians, archivists, festival programmers and musicians to connect the history of the war as preserved within collections such as the British Film Institute’s National Film and Television Archive and the Imperial War Museum with the experiences and memories of audiences past and present. This shaping of the present by the past is all the more significant as it was during the years of the Great War that cinema became fully developed as a cultural institution. This was the case not only with the production wing of the industry but also with the rise of the thriving cultures of the trade press and fan magazines and, perhaps most importantly, with the way in which local audiences were cajoled, catered for and listened to by the distribution and exhibition sectors. While public scepticism about the quality of entertainment, its perceived dangers or benefits continued to exercise debate, by the war’s end cinema was established as an acceptable social environment. In many ways cinema, both as a social space and as an art form, emerged from the war as a marker of the new, modern world that the war had ushered into existence. In this sense cinema contributed simultaneously to the sense of

Goodbye to All That or Business as Usual?

3

looking forward and to bidding farewell to the past, encapsulated in Robert Graves’ famous phrase ‘goodbye to all that’.3 However, the post-war period also inherited much from the wartime and pre-war traditions. Despite the broad social acceptance of cinema, producers and exhibitors alike were consistently having to make the case for its positive role as entertainment and as education. The 1920s saw continued development in terms of aesthetic and technological innovation in production. Both of these, in part, grew out of the pressure of developing respectability in terms of film as art. This was, to be sure, a strategy adopted to keep pace or fend off the competition from the US. The influx of European films and personnel, particularly from Germany, was a part of this overall plan, as was the contribution by British innovators such as Anthony Asquith, the young Alfred Hitchcock and George Pearson. By the mid-1920s cinema had attracted the interest of modernist critics indicated by the work of the journal Close Up.4 In that sense the ‘drive to respectability’ was as acute in the 1920s as it was during the war. Michael Hammond has argued elsewhere that the war’s effect on British cinema culture was complex and wide ranging.5 While it is a truism to note, as Rachael Low does, that the war ushered in the dominance of Hollywood cinema on British (indeed European) screens, the detail of this yields much more than the simple narrative that pitches the struggling production wing against the commercially driven, taste-pandering practices of the local British exhibitors.6 Seen from the exhibitors’ point of view it is not simply that British audiences preferred US product. They were concerned in fact with a more fundamental problem, the matter of staying in business at all. The possibility that the war would disrupt business or indeed that cinemas could be closed by the government was a real possibility in August 1914. Exhibitors responded to this by allowing the cinemas to be used in recruiting drives, by providing their tea rooms to be used by soldiers to write letters home, and by holding special screenings for soldiers home on leave or on their way to the front and for returning wounded and Belgian refugees. They included on their programmes war news in the form of newsreels; they screened official war films such as The Battle of the Somme (1916) as well as the propaganda shorts made for the War Office by the Hepworth Company. News from the front was highly valued and exhibitors were quick to capitalize on the widespread public desire to see images


of their boys in action. In short, while exhibitors were programming Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin films and were succumbing to the beginnings of the booking practices that favoured Hollywood product, they were also drawing on and adapting the practices of the music hall manager and the showman, which were tried and true methods of attracting family audiences and inculcating the cinema as an acceptable social space in the community. Perhaps the most obvious and effective combination of the War Office with the exhibition industry was in the production and exhibition of The Battle of the Somme. Hammond elaborates on this in this collection, pointing to the way in which the production drew on the already existing aesthetic strategy of the ‘industrial process film’ and the interest in each locale in seeing images of the local regiments at the front. The contribution that exhibitors made to British cinema culture was no less than to establish, through the practice of what Leslie Midkiff DeBauche has called ‘practical patriotism’, the role of cinema in the local community.

Still image from Sir Douglas Haig’s Great Push, a special magazine published to coincide with the release of The Battle of the Somme. Reproduced here are the titles taken from the film.


5

As Jane Bryan explores in this collection, Pictures and the Picturegoer adopted a policy of ‘practical patriotism’ that worked in tandem with the exhibition and production sector. Gerry Turvey’s outline of the British and Colonial Kinematograph Company demonstrates how little effort was required to alter these fictional tropes to fit the patriotic requirements of the moment. This incorporation of support for the war effort in British cinema culture at the time was set within the larger frame of the attitude of the entire commercial and industrial infrastructure during the war. This attitude was characterized by the phrase ‘business as usual’, which we have appropriated for this collection. David Lloyd George, as Chancellor of the Exchequer at the outbreak of the war, had used the phrase in a speech to businessmen. Hence the war effort was initially conceived in a way that drew on nineteenth-century economic liberalism, which held that the laws of the worldwide economic system would not permit the fracturing of markets and collapse that total war might bring about.7 Exhibitors and the industry generally were more nervous about the forced closure of cinemas for the duration of the war than they were about the collapse of global markets. For them the war could not have come at a less convenient time. The exhibition sector of the industry had seen the first boom in the building of fixed-site cinemas begin in 1909 and reach a peak in 1913. Cinemas were becoming larger and more ornate, local and regional circuits were being set up by middle-class entrepreneurs and further investment had been made in planning larger venues, many of which were poised to commence construction in the autumn of 1914. The assurances of ‘business as usual’ were cold comfort to these recent entrants to the cinema business. They represented a new type of investor in the industry and were attracted by the growing popularity of cinema, with the collateral of the property itself a risk-reducing factor. This new investor was in many if not most instances part of the local community. Their response to the war was to attempt to inculcate the war effort into their cinema and to appeal specifically to the local community. One of the ways that they did this was through the Roll of Honour films, which featured still photographs of local men who were at the front. These were put together by local film or photography companies, or, as in the case of Will Onda in Preston, the exhibitors themselves; they were shown as part of the film programme and at the outset of the war were popular with audiences. As with the Rolls of


Honour, which had initially been compiled by unions, railway companies and public services, the films moved inevitably from being rolls of those serving to listing those who had been killed or wounded. Cinemas shared in this new tradition, although as the war dragged on it was clear that there was some incongruity between the cinema as a place of entertainment and its use as a place of local mourning. By 1917 few cinemas were continuing to show these films. These films now stand as a little-known, if not ephemeral, memoir of the trajectory of the national memorializing process. They were shown in much the same manner as the portraits of the king and the generals and admirals had been, the still image accompanied by the strains of patriotic airs at the beginning of the programme. The few accounts we have of these suggest that they were greeted with cheers.8 Whether there was anything like the more anguished responses recorded at the screenings of the official war film The Battle of the Somme has yet to be uncovered.9 It is clear from the fact that Will Onda’s last films were made in 1917, and that none of the existent films in the archives at the Imperial War Museum or at the National Film Archive dates to later than 1917, that these films belonged to the earlier, more hopeful years of the war. Film exhibitors would have no doubt been sensitive to their local audiences, not only because of the generally held view that excessive public displays of mourning were not patriotic but also because they might lose audiences; thus solemnity replaced enthusiasm.10 The fate of the Roll of Honour films indicates a developing ‘public memory’, which was at once the recognition of a ‘debt that could never be repaid’ and an embrace of progress and a hopeful future. This had a deeper resonance in the contemporary public discussion of the role of cinema during wartime, to which the exhibition community was acutely attuned. As Paul Moody points out in his chapter, it was a discussion that tenaciously held on to previous suspicions and criticisms about the cinema in relation to the moral health of the nation. Ultimately, through a response to the shifting meanings inherent in films that reminded the audience of the war, exhibitors found that their greatest public service was to provide entertainment as an escape from the anxieties of everyday life. This was recognized in a more official way through the publication of the National Council of Morals Cinema Commission (NCPM) report of 1917. The commission found that the cinema had three ‘functions’: ‘recreative, educational


7

and propagandist’. Of these the commission recognized the primary role of the recreative but also urged ‘educational and other authorities [to] consider how far they can assist in raising the whole status of the cinema’.11 The Cinema Exhibitors Association and the trade press interpreted this as a positive gain and in many ways this was so. However, Moody’s research into police reports and private correspondence suggest that the NCPM report may have been more selective in recognizing behaviour in cinemas at this time. His evidence indicates that there was legitimate cause for concern and that the darkness in cinemas offered opportunities for ‘indecency’ that were often ignored. One implication that arises here is that by aligning themselves with the war effort, cinema exhibitors were able to downplay the apparently justifiable criticism of the cinema as a site of social danger. Cinemas had already contributed to the war effort by screening official war films and also by the number of films from the Hepworth film company that made a direct contribution. As Roger Smither points out in his piece in this collection, these links between the government and the film companies and exhibitors were precursors to the role that cinema was to play in the Second World War. In both, Smither argues, there was an emphasis on the citizen’s duty and the fact that the nation was in it ‘together’. While romantic depictions of the front in 1914 and propaganda cartoons and films depicting the beastly Hun were produced, Smither notes that there was considerable attention paid to the home front. In these films there was an emphasis on the role of women and on the importance of thrift and cultivation of home-grown food, the same concerns that were topics of the public information films of the Second World War. Equally, while entertainment was the primary aim of private business, there was the hope that educationalists and the industry could find some common ground for cooperation. The Hepworth Company offered a number of examples of fictional scenarios starring its featured players. One such film was Broken in the Wars (1918), a short made for the War Office. It was scripted by Temple Thurston, who had been introduced to Cecil Hepworth by representatives of the government to write propaganda scripts for the short films ‘with a propaganda flavour’ that the company was making.12 The film starred Henry Edwards as Joe, Chrissie White as his wife, ‘Mrs. Joe’, Alma Taylor as Lady Dorothea Hamlyn and the MP John Hodge, whose scheme for setting up invalided soldiers in business was the subject of the


film. Its treatment of the subject of the war itself and governmental concern about the enormous number of returning veterans provides a unique example of how the combined efforts of the Hepworth Company and the War Office anticipate similar cooperation in the years 1939–45, yet draws on both generic conventions and the question of governmental responsibility for veterans. The film opens in pre-war peacetime in Joe’s cobbler’s shop, where he and his wife are working. A title ‘Lady Dorothea Hamlyn had nothing to do and did it particularly well’ sets up the division between the tradesman and the aristocracy. Setting the scene in this way establishes the ignorance of Lady Hamlyn, which will be overturned by the war and the attendant suffering, represented by Joe and his wife. The film returns to these two with an introductory title ‘Then War’. They are sitting reading the newspaper. In a gesture of realization of his duty, Joe looks just off camera and up, a moment of noble response and a gesture towards heaven. This gesture and look also implicate the viewer in an appeal and in an affirmation and recognition of the shared experience of answering the call as a volunteer. Because the film was made at the war’s end, his gesture is as much an acknowledgement of sacrifice already made as it is an appeal. The focus of the narrative is not to enlist service but to play out the predicament of those who have enlisted. On his return from the war, Joe is permanently on crutches and his wife writes to Lady Hamlyn, ‘who has done so much to help her’, asking to see her. By now Lady Hamlyn has undergone a transformation, brought about by the realization of the national emergency, and has taken up her role as mediator between the village and the government via her connections. This is emblematic of the move to war work undertaken by women of the landed gentry. Lady Hamlyn agrees to a meeting and hears of the other woman’s predicament. In a didactic gesture directed towards the audience, she points to ‘Mr. John Hodge’s scheme providing money to help wounded soldiers to set up business on their own account’. She tells Mrs. Joe to bring her husband in next Tuesday to see Hodge. They return to Lady Hamlyn’s on the appointed day and meet with John Hodge MP (played by himself). He says: ‘Here is clearly a case where something can be done’. In a loaded remark, Lady Hamlyn says: ‘Surely the state ought to provide for cases of this sort’. The MP’s reproachful response is: ‘It’s no state duty to find capital to start people in business’. To that Mrs. Joe replies: ‘We don’t want no


9

charity. Bill can make ’is business pay all right if only ’e can get a start’. Hodge was one of two Labour ministers appointed by Lloyd George to head a Ministry of Labour. This scheme depended on charitable contributions and conformed to the government’s preference for voluntary schemes rather than direct financial support.13 The exchange assumes a kind of consensus attitude to charity among the middle and working classes that conveniently circumvents the more uncomfortable issue of state pensions for the wounded. In its presentation of potential social conflict, Broken in the Wars anticipates themes that will be played out more thoroughly in the fiction films of British cinema in the 1920s. This includes The Guns of Loos (Sinclair Hill, 1928), a drama filmed in the aftermath of the General Strike and celebrated by Lloyd George for its propagandistic value. It portrays the effects of striking munitions workers on the men at the front, and highlights the uneasy alliance formed between the aristocratic and working classes, the western and home fronts and, as Michael Williams explores, the damaged and whole bodies produced by the war. In that sense we can see how the war’s impact as a ‘memory’ functions in the narratives, as Christine Gledhill outlines in this collection. However, the actuality films, such as those documenting the unveiling of local memorials with which Toby Haggith’s chapter is concerned, are also important if lesser-known examples of the way in which the Great War was memorialized through cinema. As in the case of Broken in the Wars, the tensions between the desire to make sense of the war in terms of ‘progress’ – that is, ‘goodbye to all that’ – and the persistent pull of the past in the more quotidian attachment to business practices at every level of the industry acts as the backdrop against which the history of silent British cinema as an aesthetic and cultural form in the post-war years is played out. In their contribution to the archival section of this collection, Bryony Dixon and Laraine Porter draw on extensive and detailed understanding of the films held in the British Film Institute National Archive throughout the period 1914–29. From this vantage point they are able to outline how the concerns and themes of films dealing with the war began to shift through the 1920s, and particularly the impact that the memory of the war had on changes in both production and exhibition practices. As archivists and festival programmers, Dixon and Porter are ideally placed to observe how this transformation continues to inform their work in exhibiting these films to audiences


today. This memory-work of the cinema dealt in different ways with the traumatic events experienced in both public and private realms. Recent work on trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has indicated, in personal memory as well as in fiction, that traumatic events can be both an all-too-real presence in the memory and a structuring absence, as several chapters in this volume indicate.14 It is significant that the language deployed to evoke the Great War is invariably marked by the prefix ‘re-’, deriving from the original Latin meaning of a ‘general sense of “back” or “again” ’.15 Thus in addition to redemption, regeneration and, indeed, recovery and reparation, the act of ‘re-membering’ itself stands in as an act of revisiting, of re-membering the War, as in the literal re-membering of bodies discussed by Joanna Bourke.16 All are underscored by the traumatic re-experiencing of war, and are characteristic of PTSD itself, where an individual experiences the memory of the war as a compulsive return to and replaying of the original trauma suffered there. Building on the work of cultural historians such as Fussell, Christine Gledhill and Lawrence Napper explore the cinematic act of remembrance, each suggesting thematic groupings that define the shifting presence, overt and implicit, of the Great War in British post-war cinema. Evidently, rather than the repressed experience that would only surface from the mid to late 1920s, the war experience was a mainstay of cultural production across the decade, albeit in shifting forms. As both chapters testify, given the still painful physical and psychological effects of war, remembrance was a highly contentious activity, with the memory of the war a key factor in the British film industry’s attempts to resist growing American domination. This was never more so, as Gledhill relates, than when Hollywood dared effectively to ‘re-write’ the memory of the war through films such as The Unknown Soldier (Renaud Hoffman, 1926) and The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925). The latter, although commercially successful and critically acclaimed, was attacked by some British critics for excluding reference to the ordeals of the British ‘Tommy’ in order to valorize the American ‘Doughboy’, concerns that pre-echo the more recent controversies attending the release of Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) and U-571 (Jonathan Mostow, 2000). For example, under the headline ‘How America Won the War’, The Star railed against the ‘colossal impudence’ and ‘bad taste’ of Vidor’s film, also implying that Britain may not have been ready to address the war


11

so directly.17 Such controversy found British production attempting, once more, to counteract the perceived imperialism of Hollywood with films that not only expressed something of the national experience of the war and its aftermath, but could also offer spectacle and sensation to match. Examples include the work of Walter Summers, explored by Napper, which sought to negotiate the personal experience of an audience that lived through the events of 1914–18 with a national narrative. Summers’ films are thus striking in the way in which they wrestle with diverse cinematic and cultural modes of expression – producing a writerly effect, perhaps, to draw from Barthes – that appear strange to us today in comparison to more familiar classical forms.18 Gledhill also detects a rejection of traditional narrative trajectory in her examples, characterized by British film’s deployment of ‘pre-existing images and literary echoes’ in a struggle ‘for national pride and imperial domination, for national ownership of the War, for internal class control, as well as for different aesthetic values, all aligned against Hollywood’. As well as the role of reconstructions and the use of war as a material for melodrama, Gledhill looks at the implicit rendering of the war in popular cinema noted by Picture Show columnist Edith Nepean, which Michael Williams has explored elsewhere.19 Nepean had joined the fan magazine in the autumn of 1920 and produced columns dedicated to British films and players as part of the publication’s strategy to promote home production.20 It is thus striking that one of the distinctive characteristics of British production noted by Nepean was that of ‘the war touch’, which she described to her readers in 1924. Taking Graham Cutts’ Woman to Woman (1923) as her example, she observes the film’s connection to a series of productions that ‘possessed the “war” note, not as a principal theme... but as a “note” of terrific passion, a gleam that showed its sinister or heroic qualities in the moulding of human destinies’.21 Key to that film’s particular popularity with audiences in Britain as well as New York, Nepean suggests, were ‘the quiet scenes that betray the deep throbbing undercurrent of the great crisis’. Here, one can not only see the war being implicitly evoked as a shared cultural fabric that continued to resonate within everyday relationships long after the conflict, but also how its mythology would become alternately overt and submerged as a cultural memory, and accordingly shifting from major to minor key in its treatment.


Another significant entry among 1920s portrayals of war was Poppies of Flanders (Arthur Maude, 1927). Here, the protagonist Jim Brown (Jameson Thomas) is converted by the war from an alcoholic wreck of a man to a self-sacrificing hero, apparently reversing more familiar filmic and literary narratives of trauma. In this film set in South Africa, Brown experiences delusions – depicted by subjective shots of bottles turning into soldiers – suggesting that his alcoholism was precipitated by a past trauma and guilt, probably relating to the Boer Wars. However, as well as the film depicting Brown’s transformation from physical degeneracy to hero, we might add that it deploys precisely the kind of traumatic symptoms associated with the Great War itself, familiar to so many of the watching audience. In this way, Poppies deals overtly with one war through reference to another, but at the same time demonstrates how the kind of traumatic symptoms produced by the war would be deployed implicitly in other fiction. Poppies, like Loos, also borrowed from the modernist imagery of steel, massed men and devouring machines in representing the war. The film featured a striking symbolic image for ‘August 1914’ where soldiers walked up a staircase flanked by two giant statues of British lions on Cenotaph-like plinths, until they disappeared into the darkness beyond. ‘And the Empire Called’, the title read. In fashioning a British national memory to counteract Hollywood, such films clearly also drew from continental Europe’s own modernist responses to the war, perhaps to add another undercutting irony to ostensibly patriotic messages and thus accommodate divergent audience perspectives on the events. Amy Sargeant presents a detailed case study of the contemporary critical response to Summers’ The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands (1928), focusing on the far-reaching significance of how a work such as this can ‘honour the memory of those who die in war without celebrating war itself’. The film resonates with Napper’s notion of remembrance in presenting a historical reconstruction, anticipating the modern docudrama, that feeds into the personal act of re-membering. This act puts back together the fragmented war experience to make sense of it and thus construct what Napper terms ‘an intellectual bridge’ between the public and private, re-membering them as significant fragments of a whole. Like Loos, the film reconstructs what was a military failure into something nationally significant, and speaks as much of the postwar context within which it was viewed as of the period it pertains to


13

Jameson Thomas as Brown in Poppies of Flanders (Arthur Maude, 1927).

document. Loos’ aesthetic virtuosity, with fast-paced and often immersive action scenes, aimed to prove that Britain could make films that not only remembered events from a British perspective, putting the audience back into the experience through the almost overwhelming visuality of the events, but could visually compete with the Hollywood spectacles that had been causing so much controversy. Looking beyond the 1920s, the growing economic and political anxieties of the early 1930s witnessed the Great War being once again the subject of another cycle of films. The US adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (Frank Borzage, 1932) and Germany’s Morgenrot (Vernon Sewell, Gustav Ucicky, 1933) were readily linked to the growing economic and political anxieties of the times, where the war served as a mythic framework that functioned to separate and unite lovers, and bring in any number of spies and more explicit wartime locations: ‘There is a recrudescence of the war atmosphere in films which may or may not be a sign of the perturbed times through which we are now passing’.22


Beyond adventure and romance, the war provided a shorthand for character motivation through Hollywood films where the returning veteran transmogrifies into the transient unemployed worker of the Depression, for example I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932), Heroes for Sale (William Wellman, 1933) and of course the ‘Forgotten Man’ finale of Gold Diggers of 1933 (LeRoy, 1933). These depended considerably not only on the English literary antecedents of Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, but also on the visual legacy provided by the British cinema of the 1920s, exemplified in films such as Loos, Woman to Woman and the work of Walter Summers. Add to this James Whale’s 1930 Journey’s End as an intersection between the British visual realization of the physical and psychological horrors of the front and Hollywood cycles as diverse as the gangster and the horror film, and it places into perspective the significance of the impact and influence of British cinema. It is the wide-ranging scope of the silent British cinema’s influence on the reporting, the depiction and the memory of the Great War between 1914 and 1930 that is the subject of this collection. Each author adds an important piece to the history of silent British cinema and its relationship with the catastrophic years of 1914–18. It may be that these accounts of the way in which the film industry, from production to exhibition, responded to these events can provide a clue to understanding the interrelationship between war and cinema more generally, particularly in providing a history of the role of cinema in shaping the cultural imagination of events at the front and their memory. Neil Brand’s personal reflections as a leading silent film accompanist here point to the impact of viewing and studying these films, most of which have until now been forgotten. Certainly one can see repetition in the front-line immediacy of, say, The Battle of the Somme and the embedded journalist of the present conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or perhaps the memorialization that characterizes films such as Loos or Journey’s End, where the psychological impact of war is the main theme, has its echo in films as diverse as The Battle for Haditha (Nick Broomfield, 2007) or In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, 2007). While these connections are there to be picked up by scholars of contemporary cinema, the work of this collection is to bring to light the fertile field of British cinema history and the Great War. The articles here demonstrate the dynamic interaction between the traditions of the nascent British cinema of the pre-war period and the


15

profound cultural and personal intrusion and trauma of the Great War. In short, they give evidence to that interplay between the sensibility represented by the phrase ‘business as usual’ and the insistent impulse characterized by the epithet ‘goodbye to all that’.

Notes 1. Francis Beckett, ‘Because Our Fathers Lied’, Guardian (Review), 17 May 2008, 8. 2. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975). 3. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (London: Penguin, 1960). 4. For work on the modernist engagement with cinema in Britain during the 1920s, see Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Laura Marcus, Anne Friedberg and James Donald (eds), Close Up, 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism (London: Cassell, 1998). 5. Michael Hammond, The Big Show: British Cinema Culture in the Great War (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2006). 6. Rachael Low, The History of the British Film, 1914–1918 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1950). 7. Gerard J. DeGroot, Blighty: British Society in the Great War (London and New York: Longman, 1996), pp 55–6. 8. See Hammond, The Big Show, Chapter 3. There is an account of audience reaction to these films recorded in Durham County Advertiser, 28 January 1916. We are grateful to David Williams for pointing this reference out. 9. See Hammond, The Big Show, Chapter 4. 10. The move away from the Victorian rituals of mourning accelerated as a result of the increasing casualties during the war and its aftermath. See Lou Taylor, Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983), pp 268–70; Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 1919–1946, p. 22; and Lisa Kazmier, ‘Leading the World: The Role of Britain and the First World War in Promoting the Modern Cremation Movement’, Journal of Social History, 42:3 (Spring 2009), 557–79, 564. 11. The National Council of Public Morals Cinema Commission of Inquiry, The Cinema: Its Present and Future Possibilities (London: Williams and Norgate, 1917, republished by New York: Arno Press & The New York Times, 1970), p. xxii. 12. Cecil Hepworth, Came the Dawn: Memories of a Film Pioneer (London: Phoenix House, 1951), p. 155. 13. R. Lowe, ‘The Ministry of Labour, 1916–1919: A Still, Small Voice?’ in Kathleen Burk (ed.), The War and the State (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982). 14. See, for example, Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).


15. ‘Re-’ (definition), Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com [accessed 27 January 2011]. 16. See Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996). 17. ‘How America Won the War’, The Star, 22 May 1926 (unpaginated clipping, BFI Library). 18. See for example Roland Barthes, S/Z (London: Cape, 1975). 19. See Michael Williams, Ivor Novello: Screen Idol (London: BFI, 2003). 20. Nepean’s first appearance in the magazine was Edith Nepean, ‘This Page Is all about British Players’, 20 November 1920, 10. 21. Edith Nepean, ‘Round the British Studios’, The Picture Show, 28 June 1924, 20. For detailed discussion of the ‘war touch’ see Williams, Ivor Novello. 22. ‘I.C.’, ‘War “Backgrounds” to the Fore’, Picturegoer, 20 May 1933, 8.

Part I The War


2 The Battle of the Somme (1916): An Industrial Process Film that ‘Wounds the Heart’ Michael Hammond

The film images that we have of the Great War – the explosion of the mine at the Hawthorne redoubt, the over-the-top sequence and the haunting image of the exhausted British soldier moving through the trench towards the camera with a mortally wounded soldier on his back – are in large measure images drawn from the official war film The Battle of the Somme (1916). Since the 1960s these images have been used in television documentaries and tributes on Remembrance Day to reinforce the perception of a war of ‘lions led by donkeys’, of useless slaughter and the turning point of the century: the true dawning of modernity. These impressions are the legacy of a cultural memory that is the culmination and convergence of a range of popular, literary and academic discursive practices positioning the Great War within the larger narrative of the twentieth century. ‘Pointlessness’ and ‘futility’ are bywords in these representations. In fact, much of the scholarship that surrounds The Battle of the Somme also adheres to this axiom. When Stephen Badsey argued in 1983 that the film was a missed opportunity for a powerful propaganda message, he argued from the point of view that the film was unable to represent the tragedy of the affair and that it lacked an overall sense of the battle and its consequences. His praise for the film as a ‘haunting masterpiece’ is centred in the abiding modern, tragic memory of the war.1 In another commitment to a theory of traumatic watersheds, Modris Ecksteins points to the war as the moment of modernity in which ‘Reality, a sense of proportion and reason... were the major casualties of the war. The war became a figment of imagination...’ He focuses on the 19


staged sequence of the attack as the point that cancels out the verity, the truth value, of the rest of the film.2 In both of these accounts the film is evaluated, and then condemned for its inability to convey the truth. In Ecksteins’ case the condemnation lies in the film’s role in the creation of the war as a ‘figment of the imagination’. Ecksteins is pointing towards an imagined construction of the war by the news media and the propaganda machines, which was the work of ‘all the belligerents’.3 There is an implicit dismissal of the means by which these constructions were negotiated by audiences and readers. In that sense, Ecksteins’ figment is a one-way street. That the ‘figment of imagination’ could be a more fruitful subject of analysis is hinted at by Nicholas Reeves, whose research remains the most complete both in terms of the production of the film and its reception. He maintains that the film offered a unique experience for contemporary audiences that contrasted with the widely circulating ‘dishonest, unrealistic, mendacious images of the war. In posters, in cartoons, in speeches, in newspaper stories, the war was characterised as a titanic but exhilarating struggle between good and evil’.4 Reeves concentrates on the film’s understated and ‘dispassionate’ production values as qualities that stood out and signalled a strong sense of ‘realism’. Careful to point out that this film also marked the apex of the official war films’ popularity with cinema audiences, he points to ‘the fact that, at the time of its initial screening, this one film did give its audience a sense that they had seen the true face of modern war’. He makes the important point that the contemporary audience were persuaded on two levels: that these were authentic representations of conditions at the front and that ‘the official, factual film was indeed an appropriate medium in which to visualise the nature of the battle front’.5 His careful reminder that the film needs to be understood in contemporary audiences’ terms raises three issues that lieat the heart of this chapter, all of which spring from Reeves’ insistence on the importance of the contemporary context. The first is the contemporary assumption of the authenticity of photographic representations of reality and, moreover, the moving photographic image. Secondly, the idea that confidence in the medium of film to represent reality was an important element in arguing the industry’s case for social acceptability. Finally, it was those circulating texts and intertexts, those ‘dishonest’ images

The Battle of the Somme (1916)

21

that Reeves pronounces as offering the crucial contrasting element, which allowed the film its quality of authenticity. In 1916 these images of the front were intended by the War Office and the producers of the film to be inspirational through the presentation of a factual account of the soldier’s experience at the front. Furthermore, it is certainly clear that the film’s reception by the press was, with few exceptions, extremely positive. In fact, The Battle of the Somme was one of Britain’s most popular non-fiction films of the period 1914–18, comparable to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), which was released generally throughout Britain within the same month. Yet to ascribe the word ‘popular’ to the film’s reception is inadequate, if only in the sense that the term has an equivalence to entertainment. This was not the case. The film contained disturbing footage of the dead and wounded, particularly the over-the-top sequences that showed men falling. Press reviews and advertising for the film focused on the enlightening properties of this footage, appealing to the public’s sense of duty. There was a tension, then, between the attraction of real action footage and the educative properties of experiencing at first hand what the boys at the front were going through. This contrast between the informative, enlightening properties of the images and the entertainment value of ‘real battle scenes’ was evident throughout the film’s initial exhibition and reception.

The War Office and the trade: An aesthetic of authenticity The research that has been done on the official British film propaganda of the Great War shows that both the industry and the government saw the importance of film propaganda for providing information to a mass audience about the war from often, but not always, different perspectives and positions.6 One discernible shift in the approach to the use of film footage from the front was from its treatment as spectacle, mainly short sections of film in the style of the newsreel, to a sense that narrative form or ‘story interest’ was essential in providing the footage with a cohesive ‘plot’, and would therefore prove more popular with a mass audience. This is evident in the move from the expository style of Britain Prepared (December 1915) through an attention to linking shots with a narrative structure in The Battle of the Somme


(August 1916) to the fictional narrative film Hearts of the World (D. W. Griffith, 1918). While this seems a neat construction of a trajectory from ‘attractions’ to narrative, it is complicated by a number of factors: the difference between the way cinema audiences were perceived by the industry and the War Office; the ultimate goals that determined the position and policy of both sectors, that is profit, overseas markets and propaganda ‘value’; the way in which the War Office viewed the film industry generally; and the War Office’s and trade’s perception of the way in which audiences imagined the war itself. It is therefore essential to look at the official propaganda films of the Great War in Britain against this background of an industry coming to terms with the rationalization of production and distribution and the concurrent developments in exhibition and textual practices. This need to appeal to a mass audience, to encourage an ‘homogeneous population’ to pursue the same goals (the war effort), would be the common ground on which the cinema industry in Britain and the War Office could unite. This concurrence is illustrated by an August 1915 report to Arthur Balfour, First Lord of the Admiralty, by Charles Masterman and Sir Gilbert Parker of Wellington House. Lord Balfour wrote: They said that the most successful weapon which Germany had used for moulding the opinion of neutral countries was the kinomatograph [sic]. This reached the intelligence of the least intelligent: it required no reading: it touched on no controversial topics: it threw no strain upon the spectator’s powers of realisation.7 It is no small irony, then, that the industry, marked by the need to maximize profit, and the War Office, with its somewhat reluctant intention to take advantage of this rising form of mass entertainment as a means of providing information to a wider audience, found their interests intersecting. In short, the cinemagoing public in Britain and abroad became an important ‘market’ for the propaganda effort, while the official films of the front were potentially ‘good box office’ for exhibitors.

‘Viewed as a drama...’ The image of the war in the imagination of the public as it was perceived by the trade and the government had implications for the


23

form the films from the front took. These perceptions were based on images of war from the ‘death and glory’ style of war artist reporting in the late nineteenth century and also from popular literature and pre-war cinema. Indeed, D. W. Griffith’s later Biograph films, such as the 1912 films A Feud in the Kentucky Hills, The Massacre and The Informer, are evidence of a particular style of cutting, from panoramic overviews to close-ups of the participants during battle scenes that duplicate the ‘death and glory’ aesthetic and prefigure those in The Birth of a Nation. British-made fiction films such as The Man Who Came Back (Regent, 1915) also featured representations of the front that focused on individual heroics. These depictions of heroics and drama on the battlefield work towards a visual aesthetic of war that by 1916 was well known to cinema audiences. For example, the Yorkshire Evening Press on 7 October 1916 ran a story that illustrates this process: So the fight went on during the night. ‘Our men’, I was assured by an officer who was present, ‘actually enjoyed the thing, it was an infantryman’s fight. The Germans could not shell us and we had only to get the better of the Boche with rifle and bayonet. Our fellows were singing and laughing as they went off. Of course comrades dropped, but they did not mind that. It was a straight fight, man against man, and we were the best at the game.’8 The emphasis on action and hand-to-hand fighting has more than a hint of the frustration with indiscriminate shelling and a static battlefront. The implication was that this is an unfair, unsportsmanlike and ‘German’ way to conduct warfare. This in itself indicates an acknowledgement of the reader’s awareness of the nature of the experience at the front. The problems associated with bringing the official war films in line with these expectations of heroic action are best illustrated in the statement made by Griffith that ‘viewed as a drama, the war is in some ways disappointing’.9 The reality of war footage did not live up to these expectations for a number of reasons. The use of smokeless explosives was virtually invisible on film, and the nature of warfare waged across great expanses and the limitations of lens technology and film stock – not to mention the danger of the enterprise – created little opportunity to film the kind of heroic struggles that were circulating in the press.


There was no visual field of combat in a kind of warfare where being visible was tantamount to being killed. The Battle of the Somme was released in August 1916 against this background of public expectation of the spectacle of heroic charges and an unrepresentable reality.

The big push: A narrative structure The Battle of the Somme, divided into five parts, can be seen as having a ‘three-act structure’. The first depicts the build-up to the attack on 1 July 1916; the second the attack itself, which includes staged footage of the men going over the top. The third and final section has scenes of the wounded being carried in, prisoners being brought back and the dead collected and buried; it ends on an upbeat scene of the Worcesters waving and ‘continuing the advance’. Much of the footage is of the kind that would have been included in the ‘topicals’: a display of weaponry, the marching of troops to the front and troops resting, each group identified by regiment. This visual arrangement was coupled with the audience’s familiarity with the ‘big push’ as a narrative from newspaper accounts and letters home to produce an identifiable narrative.10 Charles Urban stated that it was important to ‘arrange all future films “to tell a story, working to a climax” instead of simply joining up the various episodes irrespective of sequence of happenings or relative connection of various incidents shown by the negatives’.11 The climax of the film is the staged attack, which had been shot probably because attempts to film the actual advance had not been successful, and in order to enhance the realism and to narrativize the battle by lending pace and a sense of time and space. This was noted in the London press: ‘Nothing more stirring than the sight of the infantry rushing over the parapet to the attack’ (Times); ‘Pictures extraordinarily realistic’ (Morning Post); ‘Riveted the attention of an invited audience’ (Daily Mail). The Palladium in Southampton advertised the film as: ‘The official record of the great advance. Photographs of the actual fighting’.12 These advertisements reveal two important assumptions by the producers and exhibitors: first, they acknowledge that there was an awareness of the larger narrative of the great advance among the cinemagoing audience; secondly, that it was to be a special event, unique to the cinema, of great interest to a wider public than its usual patrons. As for the first, The Battle of the Somme depended for its effect


25

on audience familiarity with the events of the front. The film was given a general release two months after the first assault. The actual battle was still going on when the film was first screened throughout the UK and would continue until November. Casualty lists of the first weeks had been published throughout July and August and although these may actually have been incomplete, the cost, in terms of dead and wounded, was recognized generally as having been heavy. Throughout July newspapers had been reporting the ‘Big Push’ so the newspaper-reading populace knew the structure of the battle (at least of the first few days): the bombardment, the attack and the aftermath. Concurrent with these mediated representations of the battle was the war’s impact on everyday life, from the experience of personal loss to the visible evidence of its effects in the public sphere.

The industrial process of war: A special event The ‘special event’ status of the film was implied in its local Southampton premiere at the ornate high-street cinema The Alexandra and the distinctly upmarket Palladium in Portswood. The Battle of the Somme was the first of the feature-length official war films and its simultaneous release pattern of 100 prints across the country in the first week of September dictated that its initial showings were at prestige cinemas in the main cities and towns. In its subsequent runs it appeared at smaller houses throughout the autumn of 1916 and the spring of 1917. The regional release was the subject of an intense build-up of prepublicity. For example, the Palladium and the Alexandra ‘boomed’ the film as a coming attraction two weeks prior to its screening. The technique was one of ‘roadshowing’, used to such great effect in the success of The Birth of a Nation, which had been touring the country since the previous April. The difference was that The Battle of the Somme was shown in cinemas rather than theatres, a decision that reflects the War Office’s concern to reach the widest possible audience. Close analysis reveals that The Battle of the Somme belongs to the already existing genre of the ‘educational’ film. While the narrative metastructure of the film depends for its intelligibility on audience foreknowledge and awareness of the events of the war, like many educational films of the period its structure hinges on the depiction of a process. Primarily associated with industrial process films, this method of narrative followed the production of an object through the series of


The industrial process of battle. From Sir Douglas Haig’s Great Push, published with the release of The Battle of the Somme.


27

tasks necessary to its creation. Battle of the Somme contains such a set of processes often showing the complete process between each title. Made up of 63 titles, the film devotes considerable space to showing a set of processes that celebrate the efficiency of the military and the medical services. For example, intertitle eight reads: ‘Along the entire front munitions “dumps” are receiving vast supplies of shells: Thanks to the British Munitions Workers’. There then follow three shots that depict the process of unloading shells from trucks. The first is a panning shot of the munitions ‘dump’, the second is a parade of trucks pulling into the dump and the third depicts the men unloading the trucks. The next section shows the movement of spent shells from the battery and of new shells to the dump. Intertitle nine reads: ‘Hidden batteries were pounding the German trenches for five days before the attack. Refilling limbers with 18 pounder shells after “dumping” the cases’. This consists of five shots: the first depicts the hidden batteries and is the initial image of the battle front, while the next four shots depict men loading shell cases into horsedrawn limbers. This process format was repeated in Part I of Hutchinson and Company’s magazine series, Sir Douglas Haig’s Great Push: The Battle of the Somme. The photographs were taken primarily from the film and the captions accompanying the photographs from this sequence elaborated on the process, describing in detail the action of loading the limbers.13 One caption under a still of the image of a motorcycle and truck entering the ‘dump’, which comes from shot two of sequence eight, points to the thrift and efficiency of the process: ‘A transport wagon coming up to where the limbers are, and bringing from the base hundreds of shells. Notice the empty cartridges lying about: all are taken back, refilled, and freshly charged ready to be used again in the guns’.14 The ‘industrial process’ format figured significantly in debates about the educational value of film generally. This genre of film was common to the experience of most cinemagoers and particularly to those middle-class audiences whose visits to the cinema were infrequent but who had attended lectures and educational screenings at public halls. In fact, the Cinema Commission reported in its findings that the educational value of films was reflected in essays that schoolchildren had written when asked to describe useful information they had acquired at the pictures. These included: ‘Facts of geography, history, literature, natural science, industrial processes, social life, and current events detailed in great variety’.15 Each of these subjects, apart perhaps from


natural science, accurately describe the parameters of the educational content of the official war films. So much so that the findings of the commission singled out their educational value as ‘undeniable’.16 Educational films were a problem for exhibitors, however. The educational value of cinema was a strong plank in the industry’s negotiations with official governmental bodies and unofficial interest groups, but the drawbacks for audiences expecting an evening’s entertainment were considerable. The Commission regarded the cinema’s social function as primarily offering a venue of amusement and recreation. This, of course, coincided with the industry’s desires. The educational film’s lack of success was recognized by the Commission as indicative of the insufficient general knowledge of the cinemagoing public ‘to form that connection between previous experience and the subject matter of the film which is so essential to vivid interest’.17

‘not a holiday picture’: Uplift and spectacle While The Battle of the Somme shares the didactic format of the educational industrial process film, it was not hindered by a lack of public interest. The representation of the industrial process of war included graphic and spectacular depictions of its results. As noted, the film portrayed an attack sequence and images of the wounded and the dead. The impression of the cinema audience as lacking general knowledge represented by the views of the Cinema Commission and of members of the War Office indicates anxieties about whether the film would impart education about the grave struggle or be spectacular entertainment. Reports of the film’s reception around the country highlight the contradiction between advertising real action as an ‘attraction’ and arguments for the enlightening and informative power of the footage. In Manchester the correspondent for the ‘Northern Section’ of the Kinematograph Weekly reported on 7 September 1916: Much discussion has arisen as to whether its realism is not too pronounced, but all agree that the useful purpose is to bring home to those who live in peace whilst their brothers and husbands are fighting the horrors of warfare.18 Implicit in this report is the desire to see action (along with the attendant glorious sacrifice) and the need to interpret the films as uplifting;


29

in short, a tension between entertainment and transcendence. This was borne out the following week in a report in Kinematograph Weekly on ‘Holiday Audiences and the Somme’: A holiday audience differs to some extent from a city audience, for the former, who are bent on having a good time, do not hesitate to show their warm approval of the fare submitted when it pleases them... In Southport where the film was shown last week, and at Blackpool... “The Battle of the Somme” had been witnessed by an almost complete absence of outward demonstration. Yet it was plain to see the audiences were visibly and uncomfortably impressed... [it] is not a holiday picture but it is one which holiday makers should certainly see, despite the disturbing effect it is likely to produce upon some of those who are enjoying themselves in the sun... whilst their comrades are engaged in a deadly struggle on our Ally’s soil.19 Both accounts stress the duty to keep the war effort in mind, particularly in the context of entertainment and leisure. The resolution of the contradiction between uplift and amusement or entertainment lay in the conceptualizing of the spectacle as education and information.

‘They see their own flesh and blood...’ A striking element of the official films, and The Battle of the Somme in particular, is the inclusion of regiments and the address to specific regions of the country. For example, in the 2 September edition of the Southampton paper The Southern Daily Echo, a regular column entitled ‘Topics of the Hour’, which consisted of short obituaries of mainly local officers, contained the announcement: In the Official Pictures of the Battle of the Somme, which are to be shown at Southampton next week, a certain unit, containing many local men may be identified. When it was shown at Bournemouth many people were able to recognise Lieutenant D.S. Godfrey, the well known musical director.20 In fact this element of personal address was highlighted in the initial trade reviews after the 10 August screening with phrases such as: ‘At times


Warwickshires have dinner the night before the battle. A shot of soldiers’ faces addressed to local audiences back home. This image typifies the primary form of address of the film. From Sir Douglas Haig’s Great Push.

one almost imagined one recognised the face of a friend...’ or ‘...it is as a human document that it will make its strongest... appeal to the people. They see their own flesh and blood, these soldiers who march before them, there are thousands of faces, each of which will be recognised by someone!’21 This form of address to a heterogeneous audience warrants some consideration. The slow camera pans across the faces of the soldiers afford the possibility of recognition. The direct address of the soldiers resting in the sunken road may speak to us today as a testament of doomed youth, but for the contemporary audience these shots provided the chance of finding the face of someone they knew. The address is at once particular and general. It is inclusive and yet exclusive. It is an attraction predicated on possibility rather than shock or astonishment; and it acknowledges the spectator’s position in a real space, the cinema, while privileging the realism of the image acknowledges the gap in space and time between the spectator and their friend or loved one. The fact that this mode of address does not conform completely to one of attraction or narrative integration indicates the contradictory


31

position that this film, and the official films generally, occupies in the history of cinema and spectatorship. Giuliana Bruno has noted that for the Italian popular theatrical form sceneggiata, which first appeared during the Great War, there was an accepted form of response understood and performed by audiences, a ‘mode of reception’: The sceneggiata’s mode of reception does not belong to the atomisation and privatisation of forms of spectatorship. The popular body interacts in the spectacle... As a figuration the genre [sceneggiata] continues the mode of spectatorship typical of popular spectacles, where people come in groups and crowds act collectively, providing an alternative model to the isolated, privatised film-going experience.22 What mode of reception did the audiences for The Battle of the Somme adopt? The advertisement of the film foregrounds the ‘spectacle’ and ‘thrill’ of realism, which implies a robust, patriotic performance of response by the audience. The expectation of what war footage would reveal was, as we have seen, formed by previous official war films and the format of the newsreel. The reports of the war throughout the local and national press were also cues for expectation and understanding. Furthermore, the significance of the casualty lists for determining the local population’s probable expectations of what will be shown and how to respond appropriately is crucial and demands attention. For example, the Hampshire regiment suffered significant casualties on the first day of the advance. The regimental history records: The 1st Hampshires indeed had had their worst experience of the war, comparable to the 2nd Battalion’s ordeal at Cape Helles on Aug. 6, 1915... July 1st, 1916 had cost them eleven officers and 310 men killed and missing, 15 officers and 250 men wounded.23 The War Office’s procedures for notification of casualties to families is complicated by the categorization of ‘wounded’, ‘killed’ or ‘missing’ and knowledge of these total figures may not have been known, although it is certainly the case that the fate of the officers was being continually unfolded through the Southern Daily Echo column ‘Topics of the Hour’. The story of Lieutenant Colonel Laurence Palk


‘who fell at the head of the Hampshires in the heavy fighting of July 2nd’ ran in the 11 July edition of the Southern Daily Echo. The regimental history records: ‘Colonel Palk’s loss was deeply regretted. A tower of strength from Le Cateau onwards, where his coolness and calm had been an inspiration to many who were enduring their “baptism of fire”’. In the 31 July edition of the Echo an article appeared entitled ‘Hampshires in the Thick of It – 73 Killed and 362 wounded’, reproducing the casualty list issued by the War Office. This background, the pre-knowledge of the events at the front through the popular media and any personal understanding through letters home all offer probable contexts for the reception of the film. Nicholas Reeves has documented the response of audiences as predominantly one of silence and respect, much like that of the Blackpool holiday audience. In some cases he found evidence that audiences had cheered during the lighter, marching scenes, a phenomenon common to the slide shows of military leaders and to the Roll of Honour films. These contexts for the film’s reception highlight the tension between the awareness of personal loss, the desire to see real battle scenes and the patriotic sense of duty. The education/entertainment dilemma is reproduced at the site of reception, the public space of the cinema auditorium. While the example of the Blackpool holiday audience may be evidence of the didactic tone of an industry anxious to celebrate the cinema space as informative and educational, it is also an indicator of how the film sits as a unique viewing experience for the audience of the time. Given this contextual evidence, it is clear that an emotional state underlies the reception of The Battle of the Somme, to the extent that within the accounts of its reception, the textual address and the circulating intertexts it threatens to break through to the surface. The Film Renter, a trade paper for exhibitors in the north of England, exemplifies a barely contained tension in the first two sentences of this paragraph from its review of the film: There is no doubt that scenes showing German dead, and several of our own boys in the position they have fallen, will make many people who have relatives ‘out there’ feel the lump rise in their throats. But what a different sensation thrills you when you see


33

the boys returning after grappling with death. Instead of being set, tense and grim they could not appear more cheerful if they had been returning from a football match.24 Here the address in the first sentence refers to those directly affected in the third person, ascribing them to the realm of (an)other. The dramatic shift to the first person for the description of the thrill works hard to offset the impact of the depiction of corpses by enveloping the living figures in smiles and a masculine tradition of home, the football match. This example suggests that the images of death spectacularized in the cinema space ultimately excluded private resolution through a public mourning. The film itself presents the visualization of the corpses within a narrative of process. The shots of the dead being buried come after the shots of the wounded in the dressing station and the depiction of captured prisoners. The most extensive shots of the dead are introduced by intertitle 50: ‘The Manchester’s pet dog fell with his master charging Danzig Alley’. The first shot shows the corpse of the dog in the foreground and in the background lies the soldier among blades of grass blowing elegiacally in the wind. This is then followed by five shots of bodies lying where they fell. The remaining four shots depict the burial parties gathering the British dead and covering them with dirt. The logic of the sequence is the process of the burial detail. In most of the accounts of the film’s reception these scenes were encountered with silence.25 Because the film offered a unique type of experience, a chance for a ‘real’ glimpse of the war, the audiences expected to respond with patriotic applause, as many did, with astonishment at the spectacle of real battle and finally with reverence at the depiction of death. The patriotic response is a public response where people acted collectively. Yet the extensive number of those with relatives in service or those suffering bereavement indicates a mode of reception of a private nature, one that exists within the liminal boundary between public and private as well as that between historically specific traditions of mourning. This is borne out by commentators who, encountering the images of identifiable individuals, consistently refer to the temporal gap between them and the events on the screen. The recognition trope


in these films emphasizes this gap and is imbued with a ‘rhetoric of the too late’. Writing to The Times ‘Orbatus’ stated: I have lost a son in battle, and I have seen the Somme films twice. I am going to see them again. I want to know what was the life, and the life-in-death, that our dear ones endured, and to be with them again in their great adventure.26 Orbatus articulates the unbearable consequences of the too late and at the same time the near hysteria of repetition, of reliving the traumatic moment. The loss of a loved one at the front defied the logic of a rational universe; the consequences exceeded any transgression imaginable. Seen in this light, the following responses to the film are suggestive. Mr W. Jefferson Woods, manager of the Broadway Cinema in Hammersmith, refused to screen it and showed instead a slide that stated: ‘WE ARE NOT SHOWING THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME. THIS IS A PLACE OF AMUSEMENT, NOT A CHAMBER OF HORRORS’. In a conversation with a reporter from the Evening Standard, Mr Wood defended his decision: ‘I don’t think it is suitable for those who have lost relatives. I think it is harrowing and distressing... I was at a trade view... and one man gave a shriek and said, “Let me out. I feel so bad. I have just lost a brother”’.27 In the same district as the Broadway, the Blue Halls did screen the film. Its proprietor told the Evening Standard: ‘One boy recognised his brother in the picture, an officer: “Look, look,” he cried, “that’s my brother”’.28 Here is the inclusive/exclusive character of the address, where the unaffected viewer imagines while the affected viewer remembers. Although this characterized the public responses to the film, the private experience of those directly bereaved indicated a different register. In his analysis of the reception of The Battle of the Somme, Nicholas Reeves draws attention to the diary of Lloyd George’s secretary, Frances Stevenson, where she recorded her response to the film. She had recently lost her brother in the war. There were pictures of men mortally wounded being carried out of the communication trenches, with the look of agony on their faces. It reminded me of what Paul’s [her brother’s] last hours were: I have often tried to imagine myself what he went through, but now I know: and I shall never forget. It was like going through


35

a tragedy. I felt something of what the Greeks must have felt when they went in their crowds to witness those grand old plays – to be purged in their minds through pity and terror.29 The reference to Greek tragedy is a striving for the purifying Aristotelian notions of tragedy. The desire is for illumination and transcendence, to be reconciled to a higher sacred order. Her personal narrative intertwines with the ‘public’ narrative of the film, which in turn is written across the broader, open-ended narrative of the battle and the war itself. Frances Stevenson’s recognition of her brother’s ordeal is not contingent on her actually seeing him, but on recognizing and empathizing with his plight and resigning him to his destiny.

Conclusion The transitional quality of The Battle of the Somme sits between the tradition of newsreels and that of narrative cinema. The narrative structure of the film coincided and built on audience foreknowledge of events, while the shots of soldiers, identified by regiment, provided the possibility of personal recognition. Significantly, its reception shows evidence of an attenuation of deeper emotions surrounding the depiction of death. In its portrayal of ‘real battle scenes’ it was unique: it showed men being shot and it showed images of the dead, a quality that the later official films lacked.30 It is clear that the depiction of death was an attraction in The Battle of the Somme and that the ideological justification worked, as we have seen through similar strategies utilizing the indexical qualities of photographic representation. The self-evident ‘truth’ effect characterized the debates around the film’s value as education and its potential for prurience as entertainment. Undoubtedly, this film constructed a vision of the war that was intended, in the words of the photographer responsible, Geoffrey Malins, ‘that the millions of people at home would gain their only first hand knowledge of what was happening at the front’.31 In this remark, the choice of shots, the industrial process genre to which the film belongs, the faked attack sequence, the identification strategies between the intertitles and the slow pans, the wounded and the dead and the cheering Tommies directly addressing the camera after a hard day’s work, we find an address, an assumption, a production of the contemporary audience. But there are also traces


in the reception of this film indicating that its overt rhetoric, pacifist only in that the road to peace was to continue the fight, produced other readings. Frances Stevenson’s private response testifies to the conflict between the personal recognition address, emphatically built into the film, and the depiction of corpses. The objection of the Dean of Durham, H. Hensley Henson, to these images – ‘I beg leave respectfully to enter a protest against an entertainment which wounds the heart and violates the very sanctities of bereavement’32 – gives further evidence of their potential effect when a significant number of the audience had such a personal investment. The official film’s shape and development were the result of the industry’s and the government’s competing and sometimes concurring perceptions of the audience. Those perceptions proved accurate in August/September 1916. The battle – and the war – had not ended and as the conflict’s effects became more widely known, the film’s mode of private address became more pronounced. There is no doubt that the predominant nature of the public response to the film was overwhelmingly positive, but the impact of the film’s subjective, private address probably explains the fact that the public had tired of feature-length official war films by the end of 1917. Wilfred Owen’s insistence on the power of affect when he wrote ‘My subject is War and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity’33 undoubtedly resonated across private emotional states that outlasted the Aristotelian preference for structure.

Notes 1. S. D. Badsey, ‘Battle of the Somme: British War Propaganda’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 3 (1983), 99–115. 2. Modris Ecksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (London, 1989), p. 318. 3. Ibid. 4. Nicholas Reeves, ‘Cinema, Spectatorship and Propaganda: “Battle of the Somme” (1916) and its Contemporary Audience’, Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television, 17:1 (1997), 23. 5. Ibid., 24. 6. For a full discussion of the changes in the relationship between the War Office and the Film Industry, see Nicholas Hiley, ‘Making War: The British News Media and Government Control, 1914–16’, PhD Thesis, Open University, 1985. That relationship in terms of the issue of exhibition of the official films is detailed in sections three and four. Nicholas Reeves,


7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

37

Official Film Propaganda During the First World War (London: Croom Helm, 1986) is an invaluable source of information on the production contexts of these films. Hiley, ‘Making War’, p. 400. Yorkshire Evening Press, 17 October 1916, 1. Richard Schickel, D.W. Griffith and the Birth of Film (London: Pavilion Books, 1984), p. 353. An example of this is a story that ran in the Southern Daily Echo on Monday, 10 July 1916, entitled ‘Battle of the Somme. The Preliminary Phases – Terrific Bombardment By British Guns. – Dazed German Prisoners’. The structure of the article reproduces the structure of the battle: the preliminary phases, the ‘effect on the enemy’, the ‘chaos of sound’, ‘the attack’, ending with a section titled ‘British Heroism’. Science Museum/Urban Papers 1:URB 4/3, Urban to Brade, 1 March 1918, cited in Hiley, ‘Making War’, p. 453. Southern Daily Echo, Saturday, 14 September 1916, 1. Sir Douglas Haig’s Great Push: The Battle of the Somme (London: Hutchinson, 1916), part 1, pp. 24–9. The series of photographs taken from the shot of ‘hidden batteries’ is depicted in the magazine as shells bursting over a German trench. The film clearly depicts these as hidden batteries, a fact that is borne out by the movement of a horse across the screen in the background, which lends a perspective to the image that the photographic reproduction of the magazine does not allow. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. lxv. Ibid., p. lxiv. Ibid., p. lix. Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 7 September 1916, 121. Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 14 September 1916, 91. Southern Daily Echo, Saturday, 2 September 1916. There are numerous such accounts and it was undoubtedly one of the primary attractions of the official war films. The music columnist for The Bioscope, J. Morton Hutcheson, wrote of the film The Battle of the Ancre and The Advance of the Tanks (1917): ‘Everyone has an interest in this war, and will naturally flock to see what father, husband, brother, sweetheart, relative, or friend is going through for us at home. I myself “spotted” an old friend of touring days at one of the clearing stations and have been able to “dig” him out after many years’. ‘Music in the Cinema’, The Bioscope, 25 January 1917, 368. ‘Film That Will Make History’, Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, August 10 1916, 7. Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 172. C. T. Atkinson, The Royal Hampshire Regiment, Volume Two, 1914–1918 (Glasgow: Glasgow University Press, 1952).


24. ‘Somme: Impressions of the Great Battle Picture’, The Film Renter, 16 September 1916. 25. See Nicholas Reeves, ‘Cinema, Spectatorship and Propaganda’, pp. 9–21. In this section of his article Reeves provides a number of examples of published responses to the film. 26. ‘Orbatus to the Editor’, The Times, 5 September 1916, 6. Quoted in Reeves, ‘Cinema Spectatorship and Propaganda’, p. 18. 27. Quoted in Marie Seton, ‘War’, Sight and Sound, 6:24 (1937–38), 183–4. 28. Ibid., 184. 29. Reeves, ‘Cinema, Spectatorship and Propaganda’, p. 18. 30. A report in the ‘Scottish Section’ of Bioscope on 15 February 1917, 737 stated that the Battle of the Ancre and Advance of the Tanks had ‘not been a success on their first run. It may be that so many houses, city and urban, were showing them, and it may be that the public were fed up with war pictures, but the fact remains... it failed to draw. 31. Geoffrey H. Malins (ed. Low Warren), How I Filmed the War (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1920), pp. 303–4. 32. H. Hensley Henson to the Editor, The Times, 1 September 1916, 7. 33. From Owen’s Preface to a volume intended to include only his war poems, in Dominic Hibberd (ed.), Wilfred Owen: War Poems and Others (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), p. 137.

3 British and Colonial: What the Company Did in the Great War Gerry Turvey

In the well-known recruiting poster, a small girl asks her father: ‘Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?’ Discounting the dubious reputation of the poster, it is a revealing question to ask of the British film companies in the war years. This chapter seeks to offer a partial answer by giving an account of some of the films produced by the British and Colonial Kinematograph Company (henceforth B&C) in its response to the conflict. The company had begun modestly in 1908 but, by the start of the war, had become one of the country’s major production concerns. Hence, when in the summer of 1914 the fan magazine Pictures and the Picturegoer ran a series of articles celebrating ‘The Birthplaces of British Films’, B&C was one of its three featured subjects, alongside Hepworth (established in 1899) and the London Film Company (established as recently as 1913).1 In the wake of its costly epic recreation of The Battle of Waterloo, directed by Charles Weston in the summer of 1913, B&C’s policy had deliberately shifted its production programme towards the making of longer feature films for the emergent ‘exclusives’ market; several of the war-themed films discussed below fell into this important category. As a film-producing organization, B&C was in a position directly to provide significant ideological support for the war effort and, in the early years of the conflict, it did just that. However, as with other mass-media organizations of the early twentieth century, such as the popular press, this ideological project was largely a private, self-directed activity in which company personnel responded to developments in the progress of the war both in terms of their own interpretation of events and by drawing on understandings circulating in the wider 39


popular culture of the period. The latter made its own contribution to what military historian John Keegan has described as ‘the neurotic climate of suspicion and insecurity from which the First World War was born’.2 In particular, commercial popular culture had generated both the image of the subversive foreign spy and the alarmist theme of threatened invasion. B&C took up and worked on both in its wartime films. Invasion literature had been launched in 1871 when Blackwood’s Magazine published the anonymous story ‘The Battle of Dorking’, about a successful German invasion of England. The theme was then taken up by other writers, most notably by William Le Quex, who is generally credited with developing the British spy novel. In his The Great War in England of 1897, published in 1894, France and Russia join forces to invade England, aided by information from a malicious German spy.3 Once the war had started, B&C filmed a well-known example of this genre, An Englishman’s Home (Ernest Batley). As a West End melodrama, it had been a fashionable success at Wyndham’s Theatre in 1909.4 With its stark presentation of the ease with which the citadel of an Englishman’s home might be penetrated by enemy forces, B&C’s screen adaptation came at a particularly appropriate time. Released in October 1914, it was shown after the invading German armies had swarmed over Belgium and penetrated northern France but before the stalemate of November settled the battle into lines of trenches stretching from the North Sea coast to Switzerland. The narrative of An Englishman’s Home begins with a secret German landing in an England enveloped in fog. Mr Brown and his daughters are entertaining friends for the Bank Holiday and heedlessly playing games in their seaside home when soldiers, whom he assumes to be British, enter and gain information from him about the district and its communications systems. After they leave, Brown grows suspicious of the captain’s foreign accent and, on his return to set up headquarters in the house, has him admit that he is ‘in the army of his Imperial Majesty, the Kaiser’. The family is taken prisoner in its own home and Brown’s daughters are subjected to insulting behaviour, while the captain receives reports from other officers acting as spies in the neighbourhood. Next morning, the Germans leave and the Territorial soldiers of the pre-war volunteer force, contacted by a young friend of the family who has been training with them, arrive to occupy the Brown home. They, in turn, are attacked by the returning Germans,

British and Colonial

41

whose artillery bombards the building, forcing the Territorials to retreat. On the Germans once again entering his house, the exasperated Brown picks up a rifle and shoots. For his temerity, he is taken outside and executed on his own lawn. The British force then counterattacks and captures the invaders.5 Reviews saw the film as having advantages over the play in so far as it could offer ‘stirring outdoor scenes and actual fights that were impossible on the stage’ and because its burning and battle scenes could be more realistically shown.6 However, primarily it was taken to be a potent recruiting film and a general wake-up call. So, in an enthusiastically patriotic feature article in Pictures and the Picturegoer, Leonard Crocombe observed: ‘I understand that as a direct result of this stirring play several thousands of recruits were enrolled in the Territorial Forces. The splendid film version... will, I feel sure, be equally successful in arousing men who, even now, cannot appreciate to the full our peril, to a real sense of their duty to the Empire’.7 Pictures and Pleasures put matters even more extravagantly by claiming that this was: a picture calculated to shame our young men to a sense of their duty and responsibility and fire them with the fire of enthusiasm, plainly demonstrate to the heads of families what might happen, and give them a clear cut definition of their responsibilities as citizens and their duty towards their king and country by stimulating their sons to be manly men and fight in the glorious battles for freedom and liberty and from the usurpation and militarian domination of the Germans.8 George Robb, in a survey of wartime British culture, has stated that, in general, cultural producers ‘overwhelmingly supported the war, and their output represented a veritable “militarisation of culture” ’.9 B&C’s films were part of this process, yet the company’s war-inspired films were largely concentrated into the seven-month period following the war’s outbreak, so nine of the eighteen films released between September and December 1914 were on war-related subjects. Several of the company’s dramas took up the urgent topic of enlistment. Britain’s small, professional army was virtually decimated in the initial battles of 1914. The volunteer reserve army of the Territorial Force needed further training before active service and did not arrive in France in strength until 1915. Beyond these, Kitchener, the Secretary


of State for War, proposed to create a new, mass army of volunteers. He issued his initial call for them in the war’s first week and a poster and media campaign backed him up, so that, by the following March, over half a million men had come forward. B&C’s response included An Englishman’s Home and The White Feather (Maurice Elvey, released November 1914). In the latter, an East End coster saves a slum girl from a drunk but refuses to join up when she suggests it. She passes him the symbolic white feather and he has no peace of mind until he volunteers, goes to the front, rescues his injured commanding officer and sustains a bullet wound. The girl reads of this in a newspaper and hurries to the hospital to beg forgiveness for her harsh judgement.10 B&C’s first war film, however, was released in May 1914, four months before the declaration of war. It was set in the hotbed of the Balkans, where wars had already been fought in 1912 and 1913. As one trade magazine observed: ‘The opportunities of film drama offered by the Balkan war, have not, up to the present, been taken advantage of, but in the B&C drama, The Crossed Flags... all the romantic possibilities of the struggle have been turned to fullest account’.11 The film seems to have taken some of the recent American Civil War films as its narrative model, as its complex plot has members of an English family divided between opposing sides in the conflict. Jack Bruce joins the Turkish army as a spy while his brother and sister are Red Cross recruits serving in a Bulgarian field hospital. The film also developed the plot elements that would be reworked in the later war films: movement between battle lines, an intercepted despatch, a condemnation to battlefield execution, heroic rescues and love between a nurse and an officer. Another major theme in British propaganda was also quickly arrived at. As Robb observes, the German enemy came to be constructed as ‘a degenerate, barbaric “throwback”: the “Hun” of popular propaganda’.12 This involved characterizing Germans in terms of their ‘militarism, intolerance, despotism, and slavish obedience to authority’, the antithesis of civilization.13 Britain, on the other hand, was presented as the bulwark of civilization and was associated with notions of ‘peacefulness, broad-mindedness, democracy and individualism’.14 These distinctions were a response to events during the German advance in August 1914, when women, children and civilian males were massacred in their hundreds in Belgium and when incendiarism and looting


43

destroyed precious artefacts like the old university library and Gothic architecture of Louvain. The ‘rape of Belgium’ and the flood of Belgian refugees gave rise to a spate of atrocity stories, elements of which were taken up in B&C films. The Bells of Rheims was released in December 1914. An advert in The Bioscope presented it as ‘A Superlative Example of German “Culture”. Two reels of intense excitement, dealing with the rapine, murder and devastation committed by the modern Hun’.15 Kinematograph Weekly explained: Fresh in the minds of the whole world is the memory of Germany’s ghastly and wanton crime – the sacrilege of the cathedral of Rheims. In bombing the city German gunners paid no respect to the beauty or associations of the stately pile. Even while the Red Cross flag was flying over it they apparently did their utmost to bring the edifice tumbling about the ears of those non-combatants sheltering within. A fine exposition of ‘culture’... The object of the film is to present in as faithful a manner as possible under the circumstances, the excesses to which modern Huns will go.16 Scripted by Eliot Stannard and directed by Maurice Elvey, the film, according to Kinematograph Weekly, aimed for naturalism in its presentation and advertisements placed in the magazine offered the authenticating assurance that ‘[a]ctual refugees from the devastated area play important parts in the story’.17 The cast included the iconic figure of a ruthless officer of the Uhlans who happily shoots protestors while drinking champagne and who has designs on a British nurse (played by Elizabeth Risdon), another iconic image of the war propaganda. The nurse and a French surgeon arrive at the cathedral to care for the wounded who have been placed inside, but have to struggle with brutal soldiers for entry. A priest is moved to defend the nurse from the Uhlan’s advances, but the latter wickedly denounces the pair as spies and they are condemned to be shot. Fortunately, the British then attack and, after a struggle with the priest in the belfry, the evil German is hurled to destruction by a shell from his own nation’s guns. The reunion of French doctor and British nurse then symbolically presages ‘a bond of eternal trust and love’.18 Beside An Englishman’s Home and The Bells of Rheims, B&C’s other key film of Autumn 1914 was Maurice Elvey’s It’s a Long, Long Way to


Tipperary, released in December. ‘Tipperary’ was one of the three most popular songs of the war, alongside the 1914 ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ from the young Ivor Novello, a song featured in The Guns of Loos discussed elsewhere in this volume; and ‘Roses of Picardy’, composed in 1916. ‘Tipperary’ had been written in 1912 and its popularity with soldiers going out to France was reported by a Daily Mail correspondent in August 1914, after which its fame and propaganda value became assured. The song’s words have Paddy roaming London’s Piccadilly Circus and writing to his girl, Molly, in Ireland, who is also being courted by Mike Maloney. Lines from his letter, such as ‘Should you not receive [this], write and let me know’, convey the standard disparaging stereotype of the Irish male.19 Nevertheless, an advert running over several weeks presented the film as: ‘The Song that is Cheering our Troops to Victory/ And Has Stirred Millions of British Hearts/ ...The Greatest of All Patriotic Films’.20 Copies of the song were made available to exhibitors at special rates21 and opportunities were provided in the film’s narrative for the successive verses to be sung aloud. However, filming Tipperary meant filming an Irish subject and Ireland had been a major area of political contention in the years before the war. Agitation for Home Rule had led to an act granting it in 1914, but the outbreak of war resulted in its immediate suspension. Even so, the build-up to its passing had encouraged incipient civil war between armed Catholic Nationalists favouring the policy and armed Protestant Unionists challenging it. The latter saw themselves as British and were to volunteer in large numbers, although the former proved more reluctant. Stannard’s script boldly addressed the recruiting issue and its narrative elegantly negotiated a tricky set of political contradictions. In the film (unlike the song), Paddy is an Ulster Volunteer while Mike is an Irish Nationalist. Molly’s father is an old Home Ruler who naturally favours Mike, but Molly loves Paddy. Thus, the rival political affiliations of the two men are neatly sublimated into their rival claims to the affections of Molly, and their contrasting programmes regarding the disposition of the landmass of Ireland are displaced onto their competing claims regarding her person. In turn, Stannard ideologically resolved the narrative in favour both of volunteering for the Empire’s good and of the loyalist Ulstermen. Contemporary reviews were perfectly well aware of what was at stake. The Cinema noted


45

how the quarrels of the rival lovers were ‘considerably intensified by their diversity of political opinion. The Ulsterman and Nationalist are irreconcilable and their bitter feelings are only submerged in the greater issue at stake brought about by the declaration of war’.22 Consequently, when the two enlist, ‘[i]n this incident there is produced one of the finest recruiting situations that has so far appeared on the screen’.23 For its part, Kinematograph Weekly speculated on how in the earliest stages of hostilities the Kaiser had implicitly believed the ‘Irish troubles would keep England engaged’, but declared the way ‘all parties linked hands was a revelation – old feuds were forgotten and the British Empire was one in unanimity and loyal enthusiasm’.24 In the film, Elvey’s direction illustrates this claim by having Mike, the Nationalist, leap up and tie the flags of England and Ireland together in unity. The detail of the plot has a quarrel between Paddy and Mike interrupted by the declaration of war and the Anglo-Irish squire, Sir Charles M’Hoy, explaining the Empire’s need to his tenants. His son leads off the volunteers. The recruits pass through Piccadilly on their way to the front where, once arrived, they sing the theme song as Paddy writes home. Mike is wounded in a hand-to-hand engagement but saved by Paddy’s resourceful use of a Maxim gun. Invalided back to Tipperary, Mike stays with Molly’s father, although he declines to woo her in the absence of his rival. Back in France, he is out scouting when he discovers Paddy and the squire’s son in a barn. This time it is he who effects a rescue by walking from the barn as a diversion to allow his compatriots to regain their own lines. Thus, Mike, the Nationalist, dies with a vision of Molly before him, while the Ulsterman takes his leave in Ireland, where he is welcomed by his sweetheart and receives the blessing of her Home Rule father.25 In some ways, though, the company’s most significant contribution to patriotic sentiment was its feature-length historical biopic of March 1915, Florence Nightingale, also scripted by Stannard, directed by Elvey and featuring Elizabeth Risdon in her most praised role. For The Bioscope, ‘[i]t would be difficult to imagine any subject more likely to prove of universal interest at the present period’ than a record of the life of the woman ‘who was practically responsible for the wonderful state of efficiency of our military hospitals and for the system of training for nurses now carried out at St. Thomas and King’s College Hospital’.26 For the Kinematograph Weekly, the film was ‘one


of the most interesting, and... one of the most beautiful films that the present European War has brought forth... it is a film that will receive a specially warm welcome... more so at the present moment perhaps than during “the piping time of peace” ’.27 In a sense, Florence Nightingale was the apotheosis of the ‘selfless’ nurse figure that had earlier appeared in The Crossed Flags, Answering the Call (Ethyle Batley, 1914) and The Bells of Rheims. George Robb has observed how during the war nursing was held up as the ‘natural’ feminine counterpart to masculine combat and that the ‘ideal British man and woman were most often embodied in the images of soldier and nurse – he representing the masculine virtues of bravery, strength, and courage, she the feminine ideals of compassion, nurturing and virtue’.28 B&C was clearly moving forwards on both fronts. However, there was a certain tension within the occupation between the professional nurses and the Voluntary Aid Detachment. The VADs had been formed under the Territorial Force and had begun recruiting before the war. They were unsalaried women from middle- and upper-class backgrounds who paid their own way. Consciously or not, Florence Nightingale could be said to address this contradiction in another of Stannard’s deft ideological moves. As the film presents her, Nightingale is a woman from a wealthy family who engages in philanthropic work and, as a consequence, founds the nursing profession. She is shown working to organize ‘a corps of strong and capable women’ to go to the Crimea, inventing ‘the nursing uniform from which the present one is derived’ and imposing hospital discipline by expelling a flirtatious nurse and doctor.29 Essentially, the film traces her life from childhood through her work in the Crimea in the 1850s to a serene old age. The heart of the picture, however, is the establishment of the field hospital at Scutari in the face of opposition from both the War Office and military doctors on the spot. On arrival Nightingale is told, ‘This is no place for a woman’, to which she replies, ‘You are wrong, a woman’s best place is where suffering is found’. The narrative concludes, ‘She found a charnel house, and transformed it into a hospital’.30 However, by 1916, few of B&C’s dramas were dealing directly with the war and those that did continued to rehearse the formulae first established by The Crossed Flags. Further, in July 1916, J. B. McDowell, the company’s managing director, returned to his old trade and joined the team of cinematographers recording the military campaigns at


47

the front. He remained in France for the duration and, as a consequence, film production at B&C ceased because his efforts were concentrated on making The Battle of the Somme (1916) and its successor war actualities. Nevertheless, when it did specifically address matters directly associated with the war in 1914 and 1915, B&C upheld its trademark Britishness, embraced the pro-war sentiment and rhetoric of the British state and crafted a series of films that did attempt to respond creatively to the urgency of the current situation.

Notes 1. Fred Dangerfield, ‘The Birthplaces of British Films’, Pictures and the Picturegoer, 23 May 1914, 320–22; 6 June 1914, 366–8; 27 June 1914, 426–8; 4 July 1914, 444–5. The latter two articles dealt with British and Colonial. 2. John Keegan, The First World War: An Illustrated History (London: Pimlico, 2002), p. 403. 3. See Peter Haining, ‘The Spies Who Came in from the Cold’, Chapter Seven of his The Classic Era of Crime Fiction (London: Prion Books, 2002) and David Stafford, ‘Spies and Gentlemen: The Birth of the British Spy Novel, 1893–1914’, Victorian Studies 24:4 (Summer 1981). 4. M. Willson Discher, Melodrama: Plots That Thrilled (London: Rockliff, 1954), p. 177. 5. See The Kinematograph Monthly Film Record, October 1914, 53 and The Film Censor, 22 September 1914, 3. The story is retold in Picture Stories Magazine III:14, October 1914, 114–18. 6. Leonard Crocombe, ‘An Englishman’s Home: ‘A Patriot’s’ Play Filmed: To Slackers – What is Your Answer?’, Pictures and the Picturegoer, 3 October 1914, 116. Crocombe’s article is a long exhortation to enlist based on the film’s subject. 7. Ibid., 114. 8. Pictures and Pleasures, 28 September 1914, 8. 9. George Robb, British Culture and the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 3. See in particular his fifth chapter on ‘Art and Literature’. 10. The Kinematograph Monthly Film Record, November 1914, 71. 11. Moving Picture Offered List, 28 March 1914, xiii; see also The Kinematograph Monthly Film Record, May 1914, 89 and 91. 12. Robb, p. 5. 13. Ibid., p. 6. 14. Ibid. 15. The Bioscope, 22 October 1914, 304–5. 16. Kinematograph Weekly, 5 November 1914, 52. 17. Davison advert in The Film Censor, 30 September 1914; and Kinematograph Weekly, 24 September 1914.


18. Kinematograph Weekly, 5 November 1914, 52. 19. Max Arthur, When This Bloody War Is Over: Soldiers Songs of the First World War (London: Piatkus, 2001), 27. 20. The Bioscope, 5 November 1914 and after. 21. From the copyright holders, Messrs Feldman and Co., The Bioscope, 29 October 1914. 22. ‘Filming ‘Tommy’s’ Marching Song’, The Cinema, 19 November 1914, 57, my emphasis. 23. Ibid. 24. Kinematograph Weekly, 19 November 1914, 14. 25. See The Cinema, 19 November 1914, 57; The Bioscope, 19 November 1914, 801–2; Kinematograph Weekly, 19 November 1914, 14. 26. The Bioscope, 11 March 1915, 969, my emphasis. 27. L.W., ‘A Picture of Entrancing Interest: The Life Story of Florence Nightingale’, Kinematograph Weekly, 11 March 1915, 16. 28. Robb, p. 36. 29. G.A.A., ‘The Lady of the Lamp’, The Cinema, 11 March 1915, 25. 30. Quoted in Kinematograph Weekly, 11 March 1915, 16.

4 ‘Improper Practices’ in Great War British Cinemas Paul Moody

Analysis of the environment in which films were viewed is essential in order to gain a fuller understanding of the British cinema experience during the Great War. The exhibition context is of particular importance during the war years, as cinema going throughout this period was far from idyllic; in fact, British cinemas were subject to police scrutiny and were a hub of sexual activity that the government strove to suppress. Many critics have located the reports of these activities as part of a wider ‘moral panic’ regarding the cinema and the films exhibited within it, predominantly orchestrated by religious pressure groups and self-styled ‘moral crusaders’.1 Lise Shapiro Sanders likens this movement to similar campaigns in the nineteenth century, arguing that, like music halls previously, cinemas were subjected to ‘censorship and ideological control in an endeavour to distribute middleclass codes of social practice to the “lower” classes’.2 Yet this approach has often been based on the findings of a report by the National Council for Public Morals,3 with little investigation of the actual data supplied to the committee. Even accounts that have used some of this evidence position it as a minor component, exaggerated out of all proportion in order to satisfy the personal objectives of the moral purity campaigners.4 While there was a concerted effort throughout the Great War to highlight the perceived social ills of the cinema, I have attempted to present a more balanced account, which details the problems faced by cinemas during this period and the measures sought to improve them. Due to the fact that the extant material on this issue predominantly concentrates on London, this chapter covers the incidents 49


and attempted solutions that took place in the capital’s exhibition venues.

Initial concerns The first documented concerns about behaviour during film screenings centred on problems of inadequate lighting, particularly in many of the ‘cinemas’ that had begun to develop from former music halls in early 1907. By 1909, several firms were attempting to introduce daylight projection, mainly to discourage pickpockets and ‘improper behaviour’. On 30 March in that year, Scotland Yard received reports that people attending a Hammersmith cinema called ‘Gayland’ were watching ‘suggestive pictures’ and afterwards ‘were in the habit of committing immoral acts in secluded streets in the neighbourhood’.5 At the same cinema only two years previously, there had been complaints about the sale of indecent postcards, but after no evidence was revealed on the premises, the proprietors received a caution and promised not to sell postcards of any description.6 Generally, exhibitors were reluctant to improve the lighting, as they complained that it discouraged young courting couples from attending; the project stalled for a number of years, until the BBFC’s formal establishment in 1912 and the promotion of film censorship to the political agenda. By the start of the Great War, pressure had begun to originate from the ‘moral guardians’ of the nation, who started to treat films as endemic of a wider national crisis. The Educational Kinematograph Association was established in May 1914, with the express aim to ‘minimise the bad and to develop the good effects of the kinematograph’.7 A report in The Manchester Guardian on its formation acknowledged: ‘The bad moral effects upon many children of the sensational film, leading to an increase of cases in the children’s courts and so on, is now generally admitted’.8 A leader in the August 1916 edition of The Church Times, entitled ‘The Child and the Cinema: A Parent’s View of the Growing Danger’, argued that the chief methods of drawing a full house were ‘1. The dangerous, and 2. The undesirable’.9 It continued: if we just pause and consider the cinema in its relation to the child, we shall be forced to the conclusion that it is time to check what is undoubtedly a great and growing danger to the children of the nation.10

‘Improper Practices’ in Great War British Cinemas 51

Questions were even raised in parliament, with the Home Secretary, Herbert Samuel, being asked whether, due to the ‘probable connection between the increase of juvenile delinquency and the display of objectionable cinema films’, the admission of children to the cinema should be placed under local licensing authority jurisdiction.11

Government intervention The pressure from these attacks led to a coordinated series of studies to ascertain the state of the nation’s cinemas. A major instigator of these activities was the London County Council, and a letter from its Clerk to the Home Office, dated 6 December 1916, succinctly introduces the experience of watching a film in Great War Britain: many children in arms were noticed and babies crawling about on the floor were also observed… It is stated that the offensive habit of spitting is greatly prevalent and it is suggested that regulations should be made in regard to this.12 The Clerk suggests that this situation was due to the war engaging the majority of the country’s men, generally leaving only young, inexperienced women to police the cinemas. The official view was that these women were ‘too young to be of much use in the case of panic’.13 The government also took inadequate lighting as its starting point, although in public it presented this concern as primarily about the effects of low lighting on children’s eyesight. For example, the 1 March 1917 issue of Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly had a one-page editorial on the subject, insisting that ‘it was not uncommon to hear of children having headaches after visiting the picture theatres, and it was also not uncommon that visits to such places resulted in attacks of vomiting’.14 In the same year on 18 July, the Commissioner of Police produced a report on Cinematograph Picture Halls, which again commented on their darkness and particularly the proliferation of darkened theatre-style boxes, which provided an ‘easy opportunity for improper practices’.15 Until then, the official assumption had been that these ‘improper practices’ were courting couples canoodling in the secrecy of the darkened halls. However, near the end of the Commissioner’s report he states that cinema owners had complained that the LCC had not


installed any regular cinema attendants, and that ‘the “Children’s Attendants”, when there are any, are often men’.16 Due to a reworking of the entertainment tax (which had restricted adult attendance to particular times of the day), adult admission into children’s matinees was allowed in 1916. Lady St Helier, an influential former member of the London County Council, questioned the Theatres and Music Halls Committee on 17 November 1915 about the sexual abuse of children in cinemas.17 This prompted a request from the Commissioner of Police, Sir Edward Henry, for details regarding any incidents that had occurred in London. On 19 November 1915, James Bird wrote on behalf of the LCC to Henry, informing him about cases that had come to the Council’s attention. He recounted an incident ‘in which a man was convicted last July of assaulting a child in the Picture Palace, East Hill, Wandsworth… [and of] a similar offence at the Radium Picture Palace’.18 The LCC despatched a further letter on 23 November 1915, detailing eleven cases of child molestation that had taken place at cinemas in 1915 alone. A police report on the same issue provides several further details that I have used to elaborate on the accounts listed below, drawing directly from the statements of eight superintendents involved in these cases. The descriptions in both documents highlight the apparent leniency of many of the sentences imposed on offenders. For example: • In April, a man aged 46 was fined £10 or two months’ imprisonment for indecently assaulting a 12-year-old girl by placing his hand on her thigh. • At the Victoria Picture Palace, Stirling Cocksley Voules (aged 72) was alleged to have taken a 14-year-old boy, Frederick Gibbens, into the cinema before ‘finally undoing the boy’s trousers, [taking out] his person and [playing] with it for about five minutes’. The report concedes that the only corroboration available was that they entered and left the picture house together, as seen by the attendant, and as a result, Voules faced no charge at Westminster police station. However, the superintendent believed that Gibbens ‘no doubt told the truth as to what occurred’.19 • Three days later on 17 July, a 35-year-old man was sentenced to five months’ hard labour for indecently assaulting four girls, aged from 8–10 years, by placing his hand under their clothing.


• On the same day a 27-year-old man was sentenced to four months’ hard labour for indecently assaulting a 12-year-old girl. • On 29 August a 54-year-old man was charged with unlawfully assaulting a 9-year-old girl, but was cleared at police court. • On 21 October a 45-year-old man was sentenced to 12 months’ hard labour for assaulting two girls, aged 12 and 13. • And on 1 November three girls, two aged 7 and one aged 6, were assaulted at the Vauxhall Electric Theatre, and then taken to the man’s lodgings for the same purpose. An application for an arrest warrant was in process at the time of the letter. In two of the cases the perpetrators could not be found, and one, in which a man made use of ‘an obscene gesture’ before attempting to place his hand under a girl’s clothing, was not proceeded with.20 The LCC was keen to stamp out this behaviour and took matters into its own hands. In December 1915, it introduced as a licensing requirement that a Special Children’s Attendant should be present at cinemas to ‘take care of and safeguard’ the children attending the hall: Such attendant shall wear a badge or other distinguishing special mark, shall be on duty during the whole time the premises are open to the public, and during such time shall have no other duty than the care of children in the hall.21 In addition, a new condition to the licensing agreement, ‘That no films be displayed which are likely to be subversive of public morality’, was added in May 1916.22 This further entrenched the perceived link between the activity in the cinema hall and the behaviour on screen.

Other measures The LCC’s stipulations were not always strictly adhered to, and on 10 May 1916 the police received a further report on ‘improper practices’, the fruits of research conducted over the previous month by an investigator working for Frederick Charrington. Charrington was a social purity activist who had mounted moral crusades against the music halls,23 and while this account was clearly designed to shock


the police into action, the corroborative evidence from the earlier police findings suggests that it was not an exaggeration. Not only did the reporter discover the same ‘gross immorality’24 being carried out by both sexes, as well as men entering toilets with young boys, he witnessed incidents that suggested these events were not as random as they had first appeared. He recounts an experience in the Finsbury Park cinema on 17 April, when as the lights went up for the interval, he discovered that he was sitting next to a girl of ‘no more than 14 years of age’.25 She turned to him and asked if he was going to buy her any chocolates. After he told her not to accept sweets from strangers, she said that all the other men bought her chocolates, although she never let them do anything except hug and kiss her.26 In the same cinema, while queuing for tickets, a young girl said to him: ‘I will pull it for 6d.’ He continues, ‘Within a minute or two, apparently her mother came to her and said, “I have bought transfers, we will go into the shilling seats, there is nothing doing here.” ’27 It appears that there was some form of organized child prostitution occurring, with which later observations at the Carlton and Majestic cinemas on Tottenham Court Road concurred: A young lad or fellow standing sideways against the wall would place his linked hands behind him with his fingers turned outwards. I noticed this over and over again that men would come to such lads, generally with a mackintosh or overcoat on their arm, thus screening their actual movements, but it was quite easy to be absolutely sure of what was taking place, and if further evidence was required, money always passes in the course of five or ten minutes.28 As well as this, at the Arena cinema in Charing Cross he saw ‘a lad examine a man’s private with a small electric torch, before placing it in his mouth’.29 It appears that in many cases older children were instigating the activities, although it is unclear from these descriptions whether an adult was organizing these practices or they were working independently. However, further investigation revealed that some cinemas were involved: On several occasions I have seen men give a young attendant 6d on entering a cinema, but I had no idea why this was done, until


I gave 6d to quite a young attendant at the Arena, Villers St, who at once said ‘Would you like to sit among boys or girls, Sir?’30 In response to these concerns, R. Wiest, Superintendent in the Executive Department of the Metropolitan Police, produced a written reply on 25 May 1916. He concluded: it is an established fact that acts of indecency take place in cinemas both by the older and younger member of the audiences, and by both sexes, but owing to the darkness such acts are not easy to detect unless a complaint is made by the person assaulted. The proportion of such cases which come to notice is probably small as they are generally committed with the consent of both parties [my italics].31 Once more, Wiest was asserting the prevalence of courting couples in the cinemas, although this statement is slightly ambiguous and may suggest consent between a prostitute and a client. Whatever the intention, Wiest proposed three possible solutions to the problem: to employ females with torches to police the rows; to place lights along the sides of the rows; and to segregate men, women and children, which under the provisions of the 1909 Cinematograph Act (which stipulated that gangways, staircases and passages leading to exits should be kept clear of obstruction) would prevent contact between these groups altogether.32 It was the first of these options that was to prove popular, and five days after Wiest wrote his letter, a social purity group, the National Union of Women Workers of Great Britain and Ireland, contacted Sir Edward Henry, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, to agree to conduct a trial cinema patrol scheme. After a meeting on 5 June between Sir Henry and Mrs Hartwell, Chair of the NUWW, six women were selected to conduct these investigations, at the rate of 6d per eight-hour day. In addition, part of their remit was to report ‘any films which, in their opinion, are likely to produce pernicious impressions on children’,33 consolidating the similar stipulation that the LCC had instigated in May that year. Of the patrols undertaken, complete reports remain for Miss Gray, of 30 Garden Place, Kensington. They are dated between 15 and 21 June 1916, and focus predominantly on cinemas along The Strand


and Great Windmill Street. Of the ten cinemas visited, she records an indecent incident in only one, Villiers Street on The Strand. A small boy and man were fetched from gallery [sic] and confronted with each other outside. The man appeared to deny some charges, in which the small boy persisted, but the man was sent off by the managers apparently, and the small boy returned to his place.34 There are typed summaries for every other attendant, of which the most interesting are those recorded by Miss R. Fraser. At St John’s Hill in Clapham, she reported that the attendants appeared anxious to keep her downstairs, and at the Palladium in Brixton Hill she observed a couple spoken to twice by the cinema manager regarding their conduct, before being asked to leave. In accordance with previous reports, she recorded ‘loose girls’ attending a cinema at 383–5 Brixton Road, making ‘endeavours to get into conversation with any young men who may come in, by either standing near them or sitting down behind them’.35 Each patrol assessed cinemas via the following criteria: 1. Is there a children’s attendant, with a badge or distinguishing mark? 2. Are children unaccompanied by adults seated separately from the rest of the audience? 3. Is the darkness such as to make it difficult or impossible to detect indecency should any take place? 4. Is the structure such as to facilitate indecency? e.g. Are there specially dark corners or galleries, boxes or other secluded places? 5. Is any particular age, sex or class of spectator noticeable? 6. General (Under this heading any observations which appear to bear on the subject and are not included under the previous questions, should be entered. If a film of a noticeably objectionable kind is seen, its name and character should be given).36 Of the 119 halls visited, the patrols recorded only 28 as having a special children’s attendant (despite this being a LCC licensing requirement as of December 1915) and only 32 provided a separate area for children. However, they reported only 28 as being difficult to detect


whether indecency was taking place, and only 21 with structures that they perceived to facilitate indecency. Children were more prevalent in outer districts than in West End cinemas, and general comments included problems with ventilation and the prevalence of openback seats, which proved particularly suited for sexual acts during screenings.37 The patrol initiative failed to work, nevertheless, as further observations showed that men were generally not meeting children in the cinema; instead, they met them outside and then took them to the cinemas because of the relative privacy that the darkness and background noise offered. In addition, even when the police secured the identity of the men involved, it was still difficult to prosecute because ‘many of the girls [had] turned 13 years of age, [and it was] sufficient enough defence for an offender to say that the girl consented’.38 The 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act had raised the age of consent from 12 to 16, but intercourse with a minor between the ages of 13 and 16 was considered only a misdemeanour and, as can be seen by the sentences imposed on offenders, was treated lightly by the courts. In addition, prostitution in public arenas was not new: its prevalence in nineteenth-century music halls led to remonstrations in Parliament39 and specialist inspectors from the LCC focusing attention on female audience members.40 However, the approach taken by the police towards music halls in the midnineteenth century was markedly different, with a greater degree of toleration because ‘prostitutes were to be found in all public places… [so] barring them from the halls would in no way contribute to solving the problem’.41 Of course, the greater concern over children in the Edwardian period and the Great War led to a closer inspection of cinema venues than music hall proprietors were used to, although the evidence suggests that this increased scrutiny was ineffective. Certainly, organized prostitution was still rife after the government’s efforts, as a letter from the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association to the Home Secretary in January 1917 attests. The CEA claimed that there were 50,000 prostitutes in London, of which 40,000 were of ‘alien birth’. Desperate to maintain their associates’ reputations, they argued that the reports of indecent conduct ‘were entirely without foundation’, and that instead it was the foreign prostitutes, predominately refugees from France and Belgium resulting from the war, who were the cause of these accusations. The CEA’s proposed solution was


that under the National Registration Act (1915), every woman over 14 should be re-registered and provided with a card that could be marked to identify prostitutes from the rest of society, and that all of those so marked who were not British citizens should be deported.42 However, the police disputed such claims, arguing that the figure of 50,000 was greatly exaggerated and that the majority of prostitutes they dealt with were of British descent. This was not reported in the press, which instead presented the CEA’s proposal by rote.43 Considering the CEA’s delicate position in the light of reported indecencies recorded throughout its cinemas, it is natural that it would seek to smooth over some of the more challenging facts and attempt to conceal the reality of what happened in the cinema halls. Nevertheless, perhaps the most telling indication of the CEA’s position comes from evidence published that year as part of an independent report into British cinemas, conducted by the National Council of Public Morals.

The NCPM report The Cinema: Its Present Position and Future Possibilities was published in October 1917 by the National Council of Public Morals, in response to a request from the Cinematograph Trade Council to draw a line under the tarnished image of film exhibition. The CTC represented the CEA, whose chairman, A. E. Newbould, also sat on the commission, along with the CEA’s Secretary, W. Gavazzi King, and various representatives of church organizations and other public bodies.44 Charged with leading an inquiry into ‘the physical, social, moral and educational influence of the cinema, with special reference to young people’,45 the NCPM conducted several interviews with people directly involved in the cinema and its regulation, from the police to the general public. The report outlined the complaints that ‘darkness encourages indecency’ and that the standing areas or promenades common in several cinemas provided ‘opportunities for improper conduct’, although it was the evidence from the Chairman of the County of London Sessions, Sir Robert Wallace, which appeared most conclusively to support these claims: [A] considerable number of cases of [sexual assault in cinema halls] have had to be tried in the last year or two. I was very much afraid… that there were a great number of cases which never


came to trial because the girls or women who are the object of the assault do not care for the publicity which attends the trial.46 Nonetheless, the NCPM report is curious in that it held back from damning cinemas, and a close inspection of the interview transcripts suggests that this may once more be due to the CEA. The major interview that opens the collection of evidence and is the largest in duration and scope was conducted with F. R. Goodwin, the Chairman of the London branch of the CEA. His answers showed a reluctance to increase the amount of light in the theatres, arguing that ‘beyond a certain amount you assist the undesirable women by giving them the opportunity to accost’, and when pressed on how his exhibitors dealt with prostitution, he asserted that if a woman changed her seat several times she would have been ejected.47 However, in reply to the key question, ‘Does [indecency] take place?’, he replied, ‘No, it does not take place’, and argued that the major social ill of London cinemas was ‘a lot of expectoration’.48 To corroborate this claim, the NCPM questioned him on the findings of the National Union of Women Workers’ deputation; once again, Goodwin replied, ‘No instance of any act of indecency is described by the lady visitors’, before claiming, ‘When investigation is made it is usually found that the alleged misconduct is nothing more than the privileged manifestation of affection between the sexes’.49 Goodwin’s refusal to acknowledge key evidence, his position as the ‘key witness’ and the fact that the commission featured A. E. Newbould and W. Gavazzi King suggest that the CEA was instrumental in dampening down any record of the prevalence of ‘indecency’ in Great War British cinemas. That the conclusion of the NCPM report was generous is unsurprising in light of the testimony given: While this is an evil which is not easy of proof… there is no evidence that it is more prevalent in the picture house than in other places of popular resort… [and] where it exists it can be restrained by more adequate supervision and lighting, the provision of a seat for every person admitted, the abolition of a standing room and boxes where they exist, and the provision of a special attendant to look after the children.50 Despite this, the announcement of the report’s publication in The Times quoted the Lord Bishop of Birmingham’s assertion that the


‘moral dangers of the cinema theatre might be very grave’,51 yet it was suggested that this was a problem of the content of films, rather than of the theatres themselves.

Conclusions By the end of the Great War the CEA was not the only institution trying to forget recorded events. The police declared in a memo of 1917: ‘No complaint had been made [to us] that indecent or immoral conduct had taken place in the Cinemas [sic]’.52 It is unclear what exactly was classed as ‘indecent’; however, the tone throughout the reports discussed in this article suggests a distinction between consensual acts, prostitution and abuse. ‘Indecency’, as referred to in official parlance, should be equated with acts of non-consensual or solicited sex, with the authorities in the main enabling cinemas to selfregulate with regard to the behaviour of couples. Of course, cinema unions encouraged such self-regulation as it made it easier for them to disregard any disreputable aspects of their business, and this sentiment was adopted wholesale in government documentation from that point forward. In fact, the Home Office would receive a report from a cinema manager in 1918 suggesting that little had changed since the National Council of Public Morals’ report: I am happy to say also that the lighting was very much improved, but the evils of the lavatories without any supervision were unabated. In the Majestic and the Carlton, men were seen with lads coming out together from the same WC… The new Super Cinema Charing Cross Road… still have [sic] 25 darkened boxes which can only be used for one purpose, as it is very inconvenient to see the pictures at all.53 Nevertheless, there were no further investigations into Great War cinema behaviour after May 1917. There are a number of possible reasons for this, and it seems natural to assume that the end of the Great War itself was the key factor. The deflection of official resources and purpose to other areas over the following year suggests that the problems of London’s metropolitan cinemas would have failed to register as one of the government’s main priorities. Perhaps also the intense interest in child welfare that the war had exacerbated began


to recede once the end of the conflict was in sight, and the promise of the return home of Britain’s young males was on the horizon. The end of the war may have lifted the sense of urgency over the protection of children that it had engendered. Undoubtedly, the conclusions of the National Council of Public Morals’ Cinema Commission also helped to dissuade moral campaigners from further investigation. As Dean Rapp argues, these campaigners could not ‘ignore the eminence of the members of the Commission, its convincing evidence, and its sponsorship by a social purity group’.54 However, the more likely scenario is suggested by the CEA’s letter of 1917, which attempted to place the majority of the blame on a fictitious minority, in that case foreign prostitutes. It appears that the CEA and the exhibitors it represented skilfully deflected the issue, to become a problem not of the cinema halls but of either their audiences or the films that were exhibited. The call for the deportation of foreign prostitutes was primarily a convenient smokescreen for the reality of life in the halls, fanned by the nationalism instilled by the Great War itself. Ironically, the LCC’s continual references to the evils of individual films provided another avenue for this argument. In 1917 the President of the BBFC, T. P. O’Connor, introduced 43 rules for excluding films, and those shown after this period were perceived as more damaging than the cinemas in which they were exhibited. Did cinemas rapidly clean up their act after 1917? Certainly not, but they became better at obscuring the facts, and the people who should have been ensuring their improvement instead pointed the finger of blame at easier and politically less challenging targets.

Notes 1. See Audrey Field, Picture Palace: A Social History of the Cinema (London: Gentry Books, 1974). 2. Lise Shapiro Sanders, ‘ “Indecent Incentives to Vice”: Regulating Films and Audience Behaviour From the 1890s to the 1910s’, in Andrew Higson (ed.), Young and Innocent?: The Cinema in Britain, 1895–1930 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), p. 98. 3. National Council of Public Morals: Cinema Commission of Inquiry, The Cinema: Its Present Position and Future Possibilities (London: Williams and Norgate, 1917). 4. ‘The heightened wartime fears of those social purists who were involved in the anti-film crusade turned it into a moral panic that lasted from 1915 to the autumn of 1917’: Dean Rapp, ‘Sex in the Cinema: War, Moral Panic,


5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

and the British Film Industry, 1906–1918’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 34:3 (2002), 425. Letter from Scotland Yard to the Home Secretary, 30 March 1909, The National Archives: Public Record Office (Hereafter TNA:PRO), HO 45/24570. Ibid. ‘Child and the Kinema: A New Movement for Reform’, The Manchester Guardian, 28 May 1914, 5. Ibid. Anonymous Editorial, ‘The Child and the Cinema: A Parent’s View of the Growing Danger’, The Church Times, 25 August 1916, TNA:PRO, HO 45/24570. Ibid. HC Deb, 23 May 1916, vol. 82 c2000W. Letter from Clerk of the London County Council to the Home Office, 6 December 1916, TNA:PRO, HO 45/24570. Ibid. Anonymous Editorial, Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 1 March 1917. Commissioner of Police Report on Cinematograph Picture Halls, 18 July 1916, TNA:PRO, HO 45/24570. Ibid. Rapp, ‘Sex in the Cinema’, 436–7. Letter to the Commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis, from James Bird of the LCC, 19 November 1915, TNA:PRO, MEPO 2/1691. R. Wiest, Superintendent in the Executive Department, ‘Particulars of Cases in Which Children Have Been Indecently Assaulted or Molested at Cinematograph Halls During the Present Year’, 23 November 1915, TNA: PRO, MEPO 2/1691. All case details taken from a letter to the Police Commissioner from the Clerk of the LCC, 23 November 1915, TNA:PRO, HO 45/24570. Memo from R. Wiest, Superintendent in the Executive Department of the Police of the Metropolis, to the LCC, 25 May 1916, TNA:PRO, MEPO 2/1691. Letter from James Bird, Clerk of the LCC to Commissioner of Police, 6 May 1916, TNA:PRO, MEPO 2/1691. Rapp, ‘Sex in the Cinema’, 438. Inspection of Cinemas from 2 April to 10 May 1916, TNA:PRO, HO 45/24570. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Tour of Inspection of Cinemas from 2 April to 10 May 1916, TNA:PRO, HO 45/24570. Ibid. Memo from R. Wiest, Superintendent in the Executive Department of the Police of the Metropolis, to the LCC, 25 May 1916, TNA:PRO, MEPO 2/1691.


32. Ibid. 33. Letter from Sir Edward Henry to Mrs Hartwell, 6 June 1916, TNA:PRO, MEPO 2/1691. 34. Report of cinema on Villiers Street, The Strand, by Miss Gray of the National Union of Women Workers, undated (inspections conducted between 15 and 21 June 1916), TNA:PRO, MEPO 2/1691. 35. Report on Cinema Theatres by Miss R. Fraser, undated (inspections conducted between 15 and 21 June), TNA:PRO, MEPO 2/1691. 36. Template questionnaire for Reports on Cinema Theatres, TNA:PRO, MEPO 2/1691. 37. Summary of Reports on Cinema Theatres, undated (approx. 21 June 1916), TNA:PRO, MEPO 2/1691. 38. Letter from the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women to the Home Secretary, 8 March 1909, TNA:PRO, HO 45/24570. 39. Lois Rutherford, ‘ “Managers in a Small Way”: The Professionalisation of Variety Artistes, 1860–1914’, in Peter Bailey (ed.), Music Hall: Business and Pleasure (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), p. 101. 40. Susan Pennybacker, ‘ “It was not what she said but the way that she said it”: The London County Council and the Music Halls’, in Bailey, Music Hall, p. 127. 41. Dagmar Hoher, ‘The Composition of Music Hall Audiences, 1850–1900’, in Bailey, Music Hall, p. 74. 42. Letter from the Cinematograph Exhibitors Association to the Home Secretary, 5 January 1917, TNA:PRO, MEPO 2/1691. 43. ‘Conduct in Film Theatres’, The Times, 30 January 1917, 5. 44. The Lord Bishop of Birmingham was the Commission’s President. The full list of members can be found in National Council of Public Morals, Cinema Commission of Inquiry, pp. viii–ix. 45. National Council of Public Morals, Cinema Commission of Inquiry, p. vii. 46. Ibid., p. 151. 47. Ibid., pp. 20–21. 48. Ibid., p. 12. 49. Ibid., p. xxvii. 50. Ibid., pp. xxviii–xxix. 51. ‘Future of the Cinema: The Home Secretary and a State Censor’, The Times, 15 December 1917, 3. 52. Metropolitan Police memo, 23 January 1917, TNA:PRO, MEPO 2/1691. 53. Letter to Mr G. A. Aitken, of the Home Office, from Mr H. M. Chassington, of the Great Assembly Hall, Mile End, 3 Oct 1918, TNA: PRO, HO 45/24570. 54. Rapp, Sex in the Cinema, 450.

5 ‘Shells, Shots and Shrapnel’: Picturegoer Goes to War Jane Bryan

During the summer of 1914 the recently launched British film fan magazine Pictures and the Picturegoer was flourishing. Aiming at a largely female readership, it had established a successful format of film star portraits and film stories, gossip, poems, jokes and competitions, letters pages and a children’s page. In early August, at the end of the magazine’s first six months and thus its first volume, it was announced that the following week the commencement of the next volume would be marked with a new cover design that would enable the printing of a ‘much bolder portrait on the front page’. Predicting that the improvement would be ‘hailed with delight by all picturegoers’, the editor Fred Dangerfield suggested that the cover portraits would ‘form a charming gallery of picture-players’.1 However, while the following issue did indeed boast a new cover design, it did not feature a charming portrait of a picture player. In its place was a portrait of the king. Britain had declared war on Germany and the magazine had undergone something of a transformation. This time, Dangerfield wrote: Since this paper last went to press amazing events have marched upon us, and indeed the whole of Europe; events which have suddenly precipitated this country into the vortex of a great European war. The issues at stake are of such magnitude that the whole world is roused, and no man can prophecy their full and ultimate effect. It would serve no useful purpose to fill these columns with what we are getting in every edition of every newspaper; but I am bound 64

‘Shells, Shots and Shrapnel’

65

King George V on the front cover of Pictures and the Picturegoer (August 22 1914).

to touch on the war in explanation of the changed character of a portion of this issue.2 The character of a substantial portion of this issue did indeed change considerably, even to the extent of the magazine gaining a new subtitle, ‘The War Picture Weekly’. The usual film star portrait boasted by the frontispiece was replaced with one of Earl Kitchener, and in the main body of the magazine no less than 10 out of its 20 pages were devoted entirely to the war.


The outbreak of war came as something of a shock to a British public who, in general, had been more concerned by the Irish Question and the activities of the Suffragettes than the possibility of war in Europe. However, when it became clear that war was inevitable, Britain was ‘breathless with excitement’3 and went into the war with an enthusiastic patriotism. Pictures and the Picturegoer was no exception. Indeed, it entered this patriotic frenzy with gusto, offering not merely war pictures – as promised by its new subtitle – but war stories, both in the form of war-themed film stories and ‘first hand’ accounts of war experiences. Editorial comment and cartoons were now distinctly warlike; even the gossip page was retitled ‘Shells, Shots and Shrapnel’ and provided snippets of information about the war rather than ‘pictureland’. Nevertheless, this transformation, though startling, was temporary. By the end of October, Pictures and the Picturegoer had settled back into its more familiar role as a purveyor of film gossip and film star portraits, though it continued throughout the war to publish war photographs and to discuss the war’s effects on the industry. For nine weeks, though, the covers and frontispieces of the newly titled magazine boasted portraits of royalty and the ‘Great Men’ of the British and allied forces. New regular sections were introduced, of which the most significant, in terms of visual impact and the amount of space it occupied, was a ‘Special Picture Supplement’ called simply ‘The War’ and comprising several pages of ‘portraits and war scenes that may not be shown on the screens’. This last refers to the initial ban on British cameramen and newsmen at the front, since any information from the battlefields themselves was thought to be a threat to national security. Pictures and the Picturegoer reflected ruefully on this in a cartoon that depicts its own operator cheerfully leaving the War Office having obtained an official permit to go to the front. He is allowed ‘right into the firing line’ and, ‘in spite of many hair-breadth escapes’, saves his film and ‘gets his stuff safely home’. In the final frame, though, we see him gloomily waking up in bed; his front-line adventure had, of course, been a dream.4 Like a great many other publications at that time, Pictures and the Picturegoer printed numerous images of events taking place away from the action, though, according to Luke McKernan, even at a distance cameramen were ‘often in danger from locals who held them to be spies’.5 A proliferation of photographs appeared: crowds of men outside recruitment offices, soldiers kissing wives and children goodbye


67

Cartoon depicting a war correspondent’s dream of filming at the front line (Pictures and the Picturegoer, October 17 1914).


as they boarded troop trains, nurses tending the wounded, British ‘Jack Tars’ ready to set sail, British ‘Tommies’ marching through France and allied airmen taking to the skies. Some of the most sensational images of war appeared in the form of specially commissioned paintings and drawings of front-line battle scenes. Each week in its War Picture Supplement, Pictures and the Picturegoer included an exclusive painting by ‘Special Artist’ Alfred Pearse. Described as ‘Daring Deeds in the War’ and consisting of spectacular and often bloodthirsty visual recreations based on ‘information obtained at the front’, Pearse’s paintings include scenes of the sinking of the German cruiser Hela by a British submarine;6 a Jewish soldier serving with the Russian troops ‘gallantly saving the colours of his regiment during the terrible fighting in East Prussia’;7 and a lone British gunner taking on the Germans single handed while surrounded by the dead and dying bodies of his fellow men.8 Another regular feature introduced in the ‘new’ magazine was a page entitled: ‘What War Is: Real Battle Stories Related by Eye-witnesses’.9 Each week, half a dozen or so paragraphs were published with headings such as ‘The Horrors of Battle’, ‘What it Feels Like to Fight’ and ‘Death’s Head Audacity’. The majority of these items were attributed to soldiers fighting at the front. Indeed, according to newspaper historian S. J. Taylor, at this time ‘the first person narrative... the actual word-for-word recounting of the experience of a single soldier – was reaching its zenith, and story after story filled the pages of the [press] with individual impressions of the battlefields’.10 The following extract from Pictures and the Picturegoer, written by a French soldier, exemplifies the extremely personal and vividly emotive tone of many of these pieces: ‘At the bayonet!’ the order came... It is impossible to say or to describe what one feels at such a moment. I believe one is in a state of temporary madness, of perfect rage. It is terrible, and if we could see ourselves in such a state I feel sure we would shrink with horror. In a few minutes the field was covered with dead and wounded men, almost all of them Germans, and our hands and bayonets were dripping with blood. I felt hot spots of blood in my face of other men’s blood, and as I paused to wipe them off, I saw a narrow stream of blood running along the barrel of my rifle. Such was the beginning of a summer day in August.11


69

The families and loved ones of fighting men were bombarded daily from all sides by dozens of such viscerally graphic stories and images. It is not difficult to understand the impact that they might have had on those reading them at home, particularly since the first-person narration imbues them with a very real sense of truth. This verisimilitude played a crucial role in the circulation of the many ‘German atrocity’ stories that entered public discourse at the start of the war. These were accounts – both true and false, official and unofficial, but widely believed at the time – of the brutal treatment of French and Belgian soldiers and civilians at the hands of German invaders. Whatever the veracity of such stories, they did a great deal to stir the British public into an increasing fever of patriotism by shoring up the anti-German hatred necessary to justify and endorse Britain’s role in the war. As Dorothy Peel recalled shortly after the end of the war: Because the state of tense excitement in which we existed upset our judgement and made any event seem possible, and also because if people must go to war and continue to be at war they must be made to hate each other and to go on hating each other, war stories were a feature of our life.12 During its spell as the ‘War Picture Weekly’, Pictures and the Picturegoer enthusiastically played its part in disseminating atrocity discourses, regaling its readers with dozens of apparently authentic stories and images of the ‘moral outrages’ perpetrated by German soldiers on their innocent French and Belgian victims. And as befits a magazine that was aimed primarily at female cinemagoers, the subjects of the stories and pictures were often women and children. A typical example was related by a soldier who had witnessed a German raid on a French village: In five minutes, everything was burning… Germans came through the woods and entered the town, where they behaved like madmen. They smashed in doors with their rifle butts, and threw special burning cartridges into the houses. We were warned that it was time for us to escape, but we saw some terrible scenes. A woman who had forgotten to bring some clothing for her baby, and who had returned to obtain it, was seized by the Germans. They made


her march before them, and at the end of about two hundred yards killed her.13 However, it is by no means the case that all of the stories and images to appear in Pictures and the Picturegoer and elsewhere at this time consisted of horrific scenes of atrocity and devastation. Many photographs show groups of apparently happy uniformed men smiling into the camera. In one, ‘a group of wounded British Tommies of the Manchester Regiment, [pose] cheerfully for the photograph outside the hospital’.14 Here the soldiers, several of them in bandages, are lined up directly facing the camera, and do indeed look cheerful. Another cheerful crew are a ‘merry’ group of ‘sturdy Jack Tars’, again lined up, in uniform and smiling directly into the camera.15 With 90 years’ hindsight of what was undoubtedly the fate of many of these young men, it is these pictures of real, recognizable people and not the action-filled battle scenes that are some of the most moving and resonant images from the early weeks of the war. One extremely poignant example is a spread that compares two photographs of prisoners of war, one a group of British soldiers and the other a group of Germans. The caption points out that the British soldiers, while gazing into the camera, are ‘not so merry and bright as they were previously, for unlike the Germans, our soldiers are not glad to be out of the fighting’. It then goes on to contrast this with the picture of the Germans, all of whom are smiling, with one or two apparently swigging from bottles. ‘Most of them say they are glad they have been captured’, claims the caption, ‘and they look as if they meant it’.16 The point of the comparison is clear enough, but more significant here is the question in the subheading that asks: ‘is your boy above?’17 Recognition is being invited; not merely an understanding of something that is familiar or that might be possible, but something concrete, something real. Mothers, sisters and girlfriends of fighting men are being given the opportunity to see whether their ‘boy’ is among these soldiers, an opportunity that is at once potentially distressing since it is evidence of their capture, and at the same time potentially celebratory: they are at least alive, and the photograph is evidence of their status as heroes. Furthermore, the magazine explicitly solicited photographs of soldiers from their loved ones. The editor issued an invitation to ‘readers whose brothers, sons, fathers, or sweethearts


71

have joined the colours… to send portraits and particulars of any cases that may be of sufficient interest to publish’.18 He set the ball rolling, and issued something of a challenge, with a page of photographs headed ‘Every Mothers’ Son of ’Em’. Included is a photograph of a middle-aged woman alongside a formal group portrait of her seven sons, all of them in uniform. The caption below reads: Few mothers can have so many dear ones serving their King and Country as Mrs. Coppard, of Penge. These seven gallant soldiers of the West Kent Territorials are her sons. Another mother with seven sons who have answered the call to arms is Mrs. Collis, of Epsom, the widow of a soldier. Two of Mrs. Collis’s sons are regulars, four are Territorials, and one is a reservist. All will join us in wishing both families the best of luck.19 Two weeks later details of a Deptford woman, who had eight sons in the army, appeared alongside a picture of her with her youngest children, a boy and a girl, both wishing that they too were old enough to ‘do their bit’.20 In the following issue, the magazine reported that a woman from South Wales had, until the previous week, ‘six sons in the Army; now the seventh has enlisted’. Portraits of six of the brothers are shown with the hearty greeting: ‘here’s wishing them all the best of luck!’21 Although the initial request for photographs was extended to all family members, it would seem that the contributions sent in by soldiers’ mothers were privileged and published by the magazine. Mothers were being recognized as ‘heroes’ in their own right, since they too were seen to be making huge personal sacrifices for the war effort. Indeed, equating mothers with soldiers – and thus with patriotic duty – was to become a powerful force for recruitment, as women were urged to encourage their menfolk to join up. Photographs such as these and those of the ‘merry’ groups of Tommies and Tars were the print media equivalent of the Roll of Honour films shown in cinemas around the country during the war. While local newspapers printed lists of local men and boys who had joined the colours, local filmmakers and showmen produced films of their portraits. These were shown as part of normal cinema programmes and greeted enthusiastically by audiences as they recognized familiar faces on the screen.22 Like the photographs in the Roll of Honour films, many of which were also submitted by the soldiers’ mothers,


it is clear that those published in Pictures and the Picturegoer were intended to represent, to use Michael Hammond’s words, a ‘fulfilment of duty and glorious sacrifice’.23 Looking back almost a century later, however, these images are tinged with tragedy. As Hammond suggests, ‘their poses suggest a wide-eyed innocence and vitality lost, frozen in the pre-moment of their entry into eternity’.24 The same can, I would suggest, be said of the photographs of their mothers. While the material on which I have focused so far might suggest that Pictures and the Picturegoer entirely forgot its original function and identity during these first few weeks of the war, it nevertheless did retain some of its characteristic light-heartedness. It continued to print jokes and cartoons, though it frequently turned to the war as well as the cinema as a source of humour. In an item called ‘Tell-Tale Screen’, for example, the editor wrote: It is not only the Kaiser’s enormities which are being revealed in the picture houses just now. Some of our own men must look out. There is an indignant lady near Glasgow who is waiting to ‘welcome home’ her spouse, a Reservist, at present stationed somewhere in France. Bubbling over, no doubt, with entente cordiale, he succumbed to the blandishments of a Gallic maid and allowed himself to come within range of the cameraman with his arm around her waist… And the other night his wife went to the pictures and witnessed the horrible atrocity on the screen!25 Neither was the magazine entirely devoid of its more familiar film star-centred fare. The regular ‘Picture personalities’ feature remained, star-based competitions were run, and its ‘Answers to Correspondents’ page continued to answer readers’ inquiries about their ‘film favourites’. Film reviews and film stories also remained a staple, though many of them now had a war theme, reflecting the proliferation of war titles being shown in cinemas at the beginning of the war. Films were valued according to their realism, their recruitment potential and, especially it seems, for any ‘anti-slacker’ discourses. London Films’ England Expects (George Loane Tucker, 1914) was described as ‘a bugle call to Britons’ and as ‘a stirring, patriotic play that will make a strong appeal to all by reason of its fervent sincerity’.26 B&C’s An Englishman’s Home (1914) was hailed as ‘a grand object lesson to slackers. If ever there was a cinema picture calculated to shame those


73

who still shirk their plain duty, fire them with the fire of enthusiasm, and stimulate them to fight as men in this war for our Empire’s honour, might and liberty, then that picture is An Englishman’s Home’.27 On the other hand, Pictures and the Picturegoer recognized that there were many who were unable to ‘rally to the Flag’, men who were either ‘unsuited to warlike training, or because [their] first duty is to carry on with the quieter pursuits that are still necessary’. The nation, it claimed, ‘would be in a sorry state if… [we] neglected those ordinary duties from which many of us cannot well be spared and went to learn to bear arms’.28 Resident writer Leonard Crocombe, who penned this somewhat self-conscious statement, elaborated on his theme by calling for readers to continue to attend cinemas regularly in order to keep those employed by the industry – ‘from chocolate boys and programme girls at one end to leading actors and actresses at the other’ – in work. ‘Patriotism to be of value must be practical’, he declared. ‘Picturegoers, let your patriotism be practical!’ By continuing as usual to patronise your local picture theatres you are helping to keep all these thousands of workers in employment… All branches of film-land would be affected by your selfishness if you helped to empty the picture theatres. Picturegoers! If you cannot do anything else for your country in the hour of need, at least you can help her to carry on her business as steadily as possible. Be patriotic, practically patriotic! If you must wave a flag and sing ‘Rule, Britannia!’ then go to your picture-theatre and do these things. It takes a brave man to mask his suffering. Keep smiling!29 One reader’s response to this rousing cry was published in a later issue. The letter was wholly in agreement with Crocombe, but added that ‘three of my own people are at the front and I feel very anxious and unhappy about them, but when I get a real fit of the “blues”, you can’t think how much good an hour or two of “pictures” does me’.30 ‘Practical picturegoing’ was thus seen not simply as a support for the industry but, increasingly, as an ‘escape’ from the harsh realities of day-to-day life in wartime. Furthermore, despite the magazine’s continued enthusiasm for all things warlike and patriotic, signs were beginning to creep in that perhaps not all readers were as overjoyed by its new identity as it had hoped. A reader from Norwich, for


example, received the following reply to an (unpublished) query in the ‘Answers to Correspondents’ page: We also wish this terrible war was over and done with. We have very many great and novel ideas pigeon-holed in our desks that we shall use in these pages after the war. Many of the best-known players have written special and exclusive articles for us, have sent us portraits that have never yet been published, and have had long chats with our interviewer. All we can do now, though, is to wait till the war is over.31 It is clear from this tantalizing reply that one reader at least was missing the old magazine with its predominance of film stars, and it became evident a fortnight later that this reader was by no means alone. Indeed, so many readers shared these sentiments that the magazine was forced to effect a second transformation, again overnight and without warning, by reverting to its former identity. Pictures and the Picturegoer was no longer ‘The War Picture Weekly’, but once again ‘The Picture Theatre Weekly Magazine’. The issue dated 17 October featured Winston Churchill on its cover;32 the following week the cover was graced by Reliance star Miss Miriam Cooper.33 The frontispiece featured stills from London Films’ Trilby (Harold Shaw, 1914), ‘Shells, Shots and Shrapnel’ was replaced by ‘Picture Pars for Picturegoers’, and an article about a new cinema school for the ‘screen struck’ featured prominently. The only explanation came in the form of a brief announcement by the editor: The absence of real war photographs in this issue will bring joy to a vast number of readers, inasmuch as I have received countless letters to say that war photos are less welcome than cinema news and pictures. As a matter of fact the great bulk of my readers are staunch picturegoers, and I am confident that the return to all cinema pages will be appreciated by every one of you.34 Pictures and the Picturegoer was, then, practising what it preached. This sudden reversion to its previous identity was a form of the ‘practical patriotism’ advocated in its own pages. While on the one hand, as ‘The War Picture Weekly’, the magazine was calling wholeheartedly for a patriotic, dutiful and heroic response to the war, on the


75

other its readers, who were evidently feeling the need occasionally to escape from the war, saw ‘an hour or two of pictures’ as a means of doing just this, and they clearly wanted the same from Pictures and the Picturegoer. And so as ‘The Picture Theatre Weekly Magazine’ it continued and flourished; indeed, it was the only film fan magazine published in Britain to survive the war. By abandoning its war coverage and turning its attentions once more wholly to cinema, Pictures and the Picturegoer was effectively saying ‘goodbye to all that – it’s business as usual’.

Notes 1. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 15 August 1914, 577. 2. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 22 August 1914, 17. 3. C. S. Peel, How We Lived Then 1914–1918: A Sketch of Social and Domestic Life in England During the War (London: Bodley Head, 1929), pp. 12–14. 4. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 17 October 1914, 134. 5. L. McKernan, Topical Budget: The Great British News Film (London: BFI, 1992), p. 10. 6. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 10 October 1914, 129. 7. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 26 September 1914, 99. 8. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 19 September 1914, 81. 9. The first of these appeared in the issue of 12 September 1914, 68. 10. S. J. Taylor, The Great Outsiders: Northcliffe, Rothermere and the Daily Mail (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996), p. 151. 11. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 12 September 1914, 68; reprinted from the Daily Telegraph. 12. Peel, How We Lived Then, p. 43. 13. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 19 September 1914, 82. 14. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 19 September 1914, 83. 15. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 22 August 1914, 8. 16. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 10 October 1914, 127. 17. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 10 October 1914, 127. 18. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 22 August 1914, 17. 19. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 22 August 1914, 12. 20. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 12 September 1914, 66. 21. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 19 September 1914, 78. 22. Michael Hammond, ‘The Big Show’: Cinema Exhibition and Reception in Britain in the Great War, unpublished PhD thesis, Nottingham Trent University, 2001, pp. 240–41. 23. Michael Hammond, ‘ “The Men Who Came Back”: Anonymity and Recognition in Local British Roll of Honour Films (1914–1918)’, Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, University of Nottingham, 2000, 1. 24. Ibid.


25. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 17 October 1914, 153; reprinted from Kinematograph Weekly. 26. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 12 September 1914, 70. 27. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 3 October 1914, 146–8. 28. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 29 August 1914, 22. 29. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 29 August 1914, 22. 30. Pictures and the Picturegoer, 26 September 1914, 101. 31. Pictures and the Picturegoer, October 10 1914, 140. 32. Pictures and the Picturegoer, October 17 1914, front cover. 33. Pictures and the Picturegoer, October 24 1914, front cover. 34. Pictures and the Picturegoer, October 24 1914, 169.

Part II Aftermath: Memory and Memorial


6 ‘A Victory and a Defeat as Glorious as a Victory’: The Battles of the Coronel and Falkland Islands (Walter Summers, 1927) Amy Sargeant

At Christies Maritime Sale two years ago, lots 19 to 50 were devoted to Nelson. Setting the pace for the bidding for the Bicentenary of Trafalgar in 2005, a lock of Horatio’s hair was pitched at £2000–3000, a lock of Emma Hamilton’s hair at £300–500.1 Other souvenirs of the hero included enamels, mourning rings, china and glass. This represents the merest tip of an iceberg of memorabilia produced in the wake of his death and for the centenary in 1905 (including a film made by Cecil Hepworth). The lives of heroes were then the stuff of children’s education, both east of Mansion House (as attested by Thomas Burke) and, further up the riverbank, in Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days (where Selina rhapsodizes over Trafalgar Day – she ‘had taken spiritual part in every notable engagement of the British Navy’).2 During the First World War, Nelson’s memory was frequently summoned in recruitment campaigns. The front page of the Daily Express on 5 August 1914, over a picture of head of the fleet Admiral Lord Jellicoe, invoked Nelson’s words before the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805: ‘England Expects that Every Man Shall Do His Duty’. G. L. Tucker took England Expects as the title for his film released in August and Trafalgar Day was celebrated in October with the laying of wreaths at Nelson’s Column, ‘who protected this country from invasion and secured for Great Britain the Supremacy of the Seas’. In Maurice Elvey’s 1919 Nelson: The Story of England’s Immortal Naval Hero, Nelson, the boy, is paired with Jack Cornwell, the 16-year-old gunner who stood by his post to the end in the Battle of Jutland (1916).3 The myth is reprised in post-war reconstructions, anecdotal 79


evidence of Christopher Cradock’s quotation from Nelson before engaging the enemy being transposed in Walter Summers’ 1927 British Instructional Film The Battles of the Coronel and Falkland Islands to his contemplation of the hero’s portrait in his quarters on Good Hope: ‘the fateful choice – fight or run’. Among the Allies, Abel Gance’s J’accuse (1919) resurrected the memory of Vercingetorix, the Gaul who repulsed the advance of the Teutons into the Rhinelands, while Cecil B. de Mille invoked Joan of Arc, in Joan the Woman, to promote America’s entry into the war. Meanwhile, German memoirs from the Battle of Jutland proclaimed: ‘All the gods have come back to fight with us. Valhalla in the Gotterdämmerung’.4 The purpose of this chapter is to examine a number of critical responses to Summers’ film, to evaluate the notions of heroism that it deploys and to explore the significance of the intertitle ‘a victory and a defeat as glorious as a victory’. While I agree with the opinion advanced by Michael Paris and Alex King that memorials demonstrate a widespread belief, however fond, that ‘if the dead were remembered and their example of virtuous conduct was followed, then it would be possible to ensure that they had died to some purpose’; ‘one simply had to believe that the War was justified in order to give their death meaning’, I am concerned to identify the sometimes contradictory ideas that are mobilized in the pre-war and post-war effort.5 It seems to me that the crucial question, then and now, is how to honour the memory of those who die in war without celebrating war itself. Warning in 1927 against the over-hyping of British films on such occasions as the British Film weeks, Caroline Lejeune remarked: Strip the British kinema of its essentials and you will find… one director, Alfred Hitchcock – who can be relied upon and two – Maurice Elvey and Walter Summers – who can be expected to provide the audience with good things and four films, The Ring, The Battles of the Coronel and Falkland Islands, Hindle Wakes and The Lodger – which have quality enough to give them extra national fame.6 Lejeune, writing in Manchester, was certainly closer to popular opinion than the Close Up contingent in Switzerland. Nevertheless, Winifred Ellerman’s appraisal (a tad churlish, one might venture, given that the private income that supported the journal came from shipping) is probably better known, albeit from secondary sources.7 Quite apart

‘A Victory and a Defeat as Glorious as a Victory’

81

from her snobbery (she castigates BIF’s The Battle of Mons [Walter Summers, 1926], ‘The story of the Immortal Retreat: one of the most glorious memories of the War, more splendid than any victory’, as ‘a mixture of a Victorian tract for children and a cheap serial in the sort of magazines one finds discarded on a beach’), she underestimates the value of Coronel and Falklands to an audience attempting to make sense of its sacrifice: What I object to… is that war is presented entirely from a romantic boy-adventure book angle, divorced from everyday emotions and that thereby the thousands who desire unreality are forced further and further away from the actual meaning of battle… By all means let us have war films. Only let us have war straight and as it is; mainly disease and discomfort, almost always destructive… Let us get away from this nursery formula that to be in uniform is to be a hero; that brutality and waste are not to be condemned provided they are disguised in flags, medals and cheering.8

Naval cadets saluting ships in The Battles of the Coronel and Falkland Islands (Walter Summers, 1927).


Certainly, there is cheering in Coronel and Falklands. But Ellerman, I would argue, fails to identify precisely what else is covered apart from what may be contained in ‘the romantic boy-adventure book’ and why or how this is divorced from the everyday; and I am not convinced by her absolute distinction of ‘the everyday’. Certainly, Lejeune was aware that Lieutenant-Colonel Montagu Cradock, brother to Christopher, had opposed the making of the film, doubtless prompted by the controversy surrounding information received from the Admiralty concerning the superior forces with which he engaged: Churchill (comfortably ensconced in Whitehall) denied any responsibility for the catastrophe, the first Naval defeat for Britain in 100 years.9 ‘We’ll ’ave to change our name from Good Hope to what hope’, says one of the men to an officer; ‘While there’s life there’s always hope, my lad’, he is reassured. Meanwhile, questions were asked of the Prime Minister regarding the cooperation of the Admiralty in the making of Coronel and Falklands: in addition to devoting 35 ships (the film’s ‘star’ performers), 4000 naval ratings were seconded to assist and appear in exchange for a share of the film’s profits.10 Nelson was made with the full cooperation of the Navy: permission was given for filming in Portsmouth and in the cockpit of the Victory and Eliot Stannard’s scenario was carefully vetted by Admiral Mark Kerr. However, the Foreign Secretary, Austin Chamberlain, sought to ban the screening of Herbert Wilcox’s Dawn (1928), in the interests of making peace with Britain’s erstwhile enemies. Ellerman also complains of poor photography in Mons. Meanwhile, given Lejeune’s own subsequent comments on the standard treatment of war as a subject of films, I tend to think that her championing of Coronel and Falklands was partly an appraisal of its technical achievement.11 The film (by the standards of British filmmaking in 1927) is exemplary in its cracking pace, its economical use of explanatory intertitles and the diegetic incorporation of written material: the ships themselves advance rapidly across the frame (and steaming at five knots faster than Gneisenau, it is not hard to see how the British ships quickly caught up with the German squadron less than 20 miles away). Ships are immediately identified by life belts and sailors’ hat bands; superimpositions left to right on screen convey the interception of wireless messages and writing on screen depicts the messages being transmitted. Pressure gauges, dials, clocks and calendars translate the urgency of operations. The Coronel defeat is


83

announced in London by a newspaper vendor and a bustling crowd with Tower Bridge behind them. Invincible and Inflexible, with only a few miles between them, exchange flag signals in Port Stanley to launch the chase for Dresden, Leipzig and Nurnberg. Gothic black letter (a font favoured by heavy newspapers and serious publications) is employed to denote the names of German cruisers, overlaid on an eagle, while British ships are backed by a heraldic lion. Furthermore, the film pretty much follows the account of the battles given in itineraries and memoirs published in the early 1920s: for instance Jellicoe’s 1919 The Grand Fleet and 1920 The Crisis of the Naval War, Churchill’s 1923–9 The World Crisis and Konteradmiral Foss’s 1919 Der See und Kolonialkrieg. Maximilian von Spee, at Valparaiso (soon to die with his son in the Falklands), did indeed propose a toast ‘to the memory of a gallant and honourable foe’ and greeted the gift of a bouquet of arum lilies with the words: ‘Thank you, they will do very nicely for my grave’. Foss reports that von Spee confided his forebodings to a junior Naval doctor that he would soon meet the same fate delivered to the British.12 The surviving crew of Gneisenau, those who did not perish in waters of 39°F, were taken aboard Inflexible; although whether this included the ship’s dachshund (as shown in the film) I have yet to ascertain. While star billing in the film is justifiably granted to the ships, actors are cast to resemble the actual personnel, recognizable from their appearances in official portraits, newspapers and newsreels:13 the dynamic Fisher is shown by Summers maintaining his night watch in Whitehall when the cleaner arrives in the morning. The Daily Express for 11 November 1918 featured a number of ‘personalities of the Great War’, including Jellicoe and Sturdee, the Falklands Chief of Staff. An inauthentic exception in Coronel and Falklands seems to be the letter shown in the film ordering the arming of Invincible and Inflexible at Devonport: exceeding his authority, the directive was issued by Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, rather than by Fisher, First Sea Lord.14 Possibly more persuasively for a general audience, the film endorses characters, models and scenarios already generically established by the war film in the duration and in its aftermath. The solidarity of the services in a single cause and an assumed knowledge of the chronology are depicted in an exchange between a soldier and a sailor on London Bridge: ‘Well, Jack – what’s the Navy going to do about it? – Same as you blokes after Mons – get a bit of its own back, see’.


The sailor who brags ‘Yes, Jacky, I says, an’ Jacky Fisher says to me…’ is comparable to the comic cockneys who appear (generally as batmen) in Maurice Elvey’s Comradeship (1919), Mademoiselle from Armentières (1926), High Treason (1929) and James Whale’s Journey’s End (1930) – a match for Tommy Trinder’s roles in films of the 1940s. Temporary comic relief in Coronel and Falklands is provided in the slapstick incident where two sailors fling paint onto the hull of their ship and in the requisition of the chaplain’s harmonium to fuel the ship’s boilers: ‘It’s an ill wind that blows nobody no good!’ joshes a sailor. The home front (as in Noël Coward’s 1942 In Which We Serve) is similarly shown to contribute to the war effort, the men of Devonport docks running to their stations and fulfilling the Admiralty’s order in record time.15 The Falklands squadron, we are told, fittingly bears ‘names from the four corners of Britain – Kent, Cornwall, Glasgow and Carnarvon’. The Falkland Islanders themselves (a Dad’s Army motley crew) are presented as plucky little Britons in an outpost of Empire, comparable to the plucky little islanders of Ealing’s Whisky Galore! (Alexander MacKendrick, 1948) and plucky little Burgundians of Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius, 1949). A diminutive sergeant presumes that von Spee’s retreat results from his sighting of the troops on land rather than the superior armoured force of the British cruisers and destroyers. However, the chronology of the war is, I suggest, important here. After the Battle of Jutland, Admiral Beatty commented, wearily, ‘There is something wrong with our bloody ships today… and something wrong with our system’. Ninety-nine German ships sank 112,000 tons of British metal while 151 British ships sank 62,000 tons of German, the remainder managing to flee to port in the fog and darkness.16 The battle was reported in the same terms of ‘victory in defeat’ affectively conveyed in BIF’s 1921 reconstruction.17 ‘I return to a London seething with bewilderment’, wrote Vera Brittain: Were we celebrating a glorious naval victory or an ignominious defeat? We hardly knew; and each fresh edition of the newspapers obscured rather than illuminated this really quite important distinction.18 After the battle, indecisive for its protagonists, German strategy shifted to what was called ‘unrestricted submarine warfare’, striking


85

ships without regard to their naval or mercantile status, ‘without waiting to rescue passengers or crew or to discover whether the ship they were sinking belonged to the enemy or to some nation which was not at war’ (as with the mistaken attack on the Lusitania in 1915).19 At Jutland, the fleets were tracked by zeppelins, extending the arena of war from the sea to the air. The extension of the range of targets deemed legitimate reflects on both Germany’s aims in going to war and on the means it deemed just in war (the distinction made in classical war theory and in law between jus ad bellum and jus in bello). Even before the war, the Quaker Cadbury had warned that the submarine marked ‘an exercise in perilous barbarism without a compensatory military value’.20 For many commentators, submarines represented a new form of subterfuge, an unjust instrument of warfare. The ideal war, it was suggested, was represented by a tournament of single warriors; the sort of war romanticized by David Lloyd George in his description of flying aces as the knights errant of the skies, ‘they recall the old legends of chivalry’.21 A code of honour governs the conduct of Cradock, Sturdee and Graf von Spee, equals of the professional, aristocratic and cosmopolitan soldiers de Boeldieu and von Rauffenstein in Jean Renoir’s 1937 La Grande Illusion, and of the officers in Powell and Pressburger’s 1956 Battle of the River Plate (returning to the Pacific) and Ill Met by Moonlight (1957). Certainly, the war in the Pacific was more the sort of war that the Admiralty envisaged (and wanted) than the war as envisaged by Erskine Childers (in his 1903 novel, The Riddle of the Sands) and by others (and as it became) in the North Atlantic. The Battle of the Falklands (8 December 1914), then, can be construed as some sort of ideal scenario, matching small numbers of armoured protagonists, in which the strategic superiority of the victor is measured by the physical equivalence of the combatants; the Battle of the Coronel (1 November 1914) can be construed as a moral victory for the vanquished, bravely facing unequal odds. If, as Lev Tolstoy maintained, standing armies generate wars, then the First World War was a war in the making.22 Germany massively reinforced its Navy in the preceding decade, ostensibly in pursuit of its colonial ambitions, and Britain struggled to maintain parity. Norman Angell, responding to Tolstoy’s moral stand against militarism, argued in The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage (published in 1909, republished in 1911


and in the 1930s) that a war consequent on the accumulation of arms would not materially benefit either nation: [W]ealth in the economically civilised world is founded upon credit and commercial contract. If these are tampered with in an attempt at confiscation by a conqueror, the credit-dependent wealth not only vanishes, thus giving the conqueror nothing for his conquest, but in its collapse involves the conqueror; so that if conquest is not to injure the conqueror, he must scrupulously respect the enemy’s property, in which case conquest becomes economically futile… Germany’s success in conquest would be a demonstration of the complete economic futility of conquest.23 In a series of polemical articles (the pacifist Bertrand Russell, for one, was provoked to reply), the Foreign Affairs correspondent of the highbrow journal New Age castigated Angell (not entirely consistently) for expounding an argument (‘the fatuous arguments of humanitarian idealists’) ‘founded on a fallacy’. Proclaiming his allegiance to Nietzschean Socialism (rather than what he termed ‘the democracy of sheep’), ‘Verdad’ asserted: ‘Nations are not always actuated by purely material motives (the struggle for existence; the will to live) but by something much nobler – the desire for power’. ‘The gush in the English and American papers about arbitration’, he continued, ‘is enough to turn the stomach of any man with a knowledge of history and psychology’: Why have there been wars? Because certain peoples desired to expand and other peoples objected. Why did certain peoples desire to expand? Because – apart from the necessity of acquiring fresh territory owing to an increased population – they were animated by that instinct which Schopenhauer called the will to live, which Nietzsche called the will to power, and the effects of which Darwin called the struggle for existence. They were decidedly not animated by the expectations of larger profits on invested capital or by trading considerations, as Mr. Norman Angell insists.24 The New Age (here adopting a defencist position) suggested that Peace Leagues, arbitration and the limitations of armaments tend


87

to lead to war instead. Mercantile interests are similarly despised in Comradeship and Blighty (Adrian Brunel, 1927). However, as both the Prussian military strategist Clausewitz and subsequently Karl Marx contended, the historic role of the British Navy in wartime was to pursue its peacetime policy in trade ‘by other means’.25 Britain’s supremacy of the seas is perpetually represented as its guardianship of their freedom. Mark Kerr (Britain’s ‘favourite Admiral’) states the case succinctly in the programme notes for Elvey’s Nelson: Patriotism cannot be dismissed as purely a sentiment, it is equally with duty a virtue and also a commercial asset; it is the spirit which binds the Empire together and makes it strong enough to keep its place in the world… In addition to Lord Nelson’s work for the Empire, was the spirit he left in the Royal Navy, and it is to this spirit and his teachings of comradeship that we largely owe our success in the Great War that has just been concluded. In Coronel and Falklands, advised that Good Hope is ‘heavily outmatched in speed, armour and gunpower’ by the enemy and that ‘it might be wiser to avoid action’, Cradock determines to fight: ‘We might prevent him reaching the Atlantic and our trade routes’. One of the problems with Dawn, it seems to me (apart from its elephantine slowness), is that its characters are rendered as the victims of war as an abstract notion. Big words are here used against the war: ‘The Rulers of Europe were the puppets of Carnage… all enslaved to the system of War’. Conduct in war is represented by a German officer resignedly performing his duty (rejecting the appeals for clemency addressed to him by the neutral American attaché) and an infantry man refusing to perform his duty as a member of the firing squad. While, as Iris Barry remarked, Dawn may be applauded in that it serves an anti-war mission (unremarkable for its date), it mystifies war (just as the neoDarwinists mystified war) by discounting political agency and disguising the ideological imperatives that obliged Britain to go to war.26 Later editions of Angell’s The Great Illusion acknowledge the enormous profits made by individuals, rather than by states, in the duration. However, James Joll convincingly demonstrates that the declaration of war did not serve the immediate interests even of arms manufacturers,


with markets in 1914 crossing international borders. Nevertheless, in the 1920s general trade and the Empire are presented, I think, as the dominant retrospective justification for the war and, especially, the war at sea. Joll notes that the Navy and the Navy League (which, with the Admiralty, contributed to the making of Coronel and Falklands) had always been popular in Britain: It seemed to be the symbol of Britain’s imperial growth but could also be supported on good liberal grounds; it ensured ‘the freedom of the seas’ and thus the freedom of trade: it had played an humanitarian role in the suppression of the slave trade.27 Lloyd George’s 1918 election manifesto included his defence of free trade. Wall maps produced for the Empire Exhibition at Olympia in 1924 show the Falklands vividly coloured along with more sizeable British territories; a Navy League map produced for schools in 1925 indicates the dates and locations of battles, shows profiles of British warships from the time of King Alfred (founder of the fleet) to the time of Nelson and the Victory and up to the 1920s, with keys to the identification of flag signals (including ‘England Expects...’) and insignia and charts comparing the tonnage of the British and foreign mercantile and naval marine.28 Harley Knoles’ 1927 Land of Hope and Glory opens with a rotating globe and the dominions illuminated. The Empire is invoked even in films not directly concerned with recent hostilities: for instance South (Frank Hurley, 1919), the story of Shackleton’s expedition in the Antarctic, ends with a sunset as a reminder of the Empire on which the sun never sets. Jacques Ellul suggests that propaganda usually works covertly towards integration (rather than conversion) and finds film peculiarly well suited to this purpose.29 It is no great surprise, therefore, that we find in post-war films the survival and endorsement of pre-war ideas, however much the poets insisted that certain ‘Old Lies’ be once and for all refuted. ‘The fundamental importance of war commemoration in the inter-war period’, concludes Alex King, ‘lay precisely in its being such a socially comprehensive creative activity’: The professional creative work of specialists was an essential part of it, but of greater significance was the effort put by all concerned into finding ways to understand the objects created.30


89

Such ideas are, in Francis Spufford’s apt phrase, part of the ‘imaginative compost’ and are not that readily uprooted.31 And while Nelson, the archetypal Romantic hero, was often enlisted in this campaign during the war, many of the notions of heroism that the post-war films employ are not strictly speaking romantic (and this is only one reason for my taking issue with Ellerman’s criticism). They owe more, I think, to the stoical tradition of Marcus Aurelius, best known in the translation from the Greek by the soldier-scholar LieutenantColonel Arthur Farquharson, and available in numerous pocket-book selections. Furthermore If (written in 1895 by Rudyard Kipling, a contributor to the British propaganda effort during the war, and still ‘the nation’s favourite poem’), is, I would suggest, pretty much a reworking of The Meditations.32 Both have more to say about what it might mean to be a man, an everyday quantity, than to be a hero (in the exceptional, Romantic sense). In this tradition, I would suggest, honourable failures are accounted alongside victories and little men assume greatness: Of man’s life, his time is a point, his existence a flux, his sensation clouded, his body’s entire composition corruptible, his vital spirit an eddy of breath, his fortune hard to predict, his fame uncertain. Briefly, all things of the body, a river; all the things of the spirit, dream and delirium; his life a warfare and a sojourn in a strange land, his after-fame oblivion. What then can be his escort through life? One thing and one thing only, Philosophy.33 While Thomas Carlyle’s heroes – following Nietzsche – are all Great Men (of letters, of religion, of poetry and of prophecy, even Napoleon, as a Commander before Waterloo),34 the exemplary Aurelian hero of the First World War is, perhaps, Captain Scott (in other words, not a war hero at all, nor a success). Land of Hope and Glory aligns Scott with Captain Cook, Wolfe of Quebec and Lord Nelson as an ‘inspirationally’ famous man and shows him writing his final words in March 1912, telling of the bravery and hardihood of his team: ‘For god’s sake look after our people’. This is precisely why, I think, his memory and mythology, ‘the pathetic tragedy of a gallant gentleman’, could be so pertinently revisited in 1948, using the meditations provided by Scott’s own letters and diary as commentary.35 Charles Frend’s film, like Coronel and Falklands, combines the ‘war’ effort at home with


action at the ‘front’, even though the wartime enemy is re-identified and displaced as a crusade against the self and the elements. Although, in the 1920s, Scott was already acknowledged to have blundered in his strategy, he was, like Cradock on Good Hope, ennobled in spirit. On the one hand, this may substitute one mystical rite for another; on the other, it purposefully offers comfort to those whose ‘heroes’ were not around to share in the victory. For them, ‘a defeat as glorious as a victory’ may have been the only consolation to be had.

Notes With thanks to Professor Christine Gledhill, Dr Toby Haggith (IWM) and Mr Randall; also to Professor Dick Clements, University of Bristol Department of Engineering and the University of Bristol Royal Naval Unit. Special thanks to Roel Vande Winkel for appreciating the finer sartorial points of the original version of this paper. 1. Michael Nexton, Frank Collier and David Harries, Maritime and Naval Battles, Christies London sale catalogue, 21 May 2003. Letters sent by Nelson to Emma and china sets commissioned by Nelson have been offered for auction subsequently. 2. See Thomas Burke, Son of London (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1946); Kenneth Grahame, ‘Dream Days’ [1898] in The Penguin Kenneth Grahame (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), pp. 94 and 96; also Arthur Conan Doyle’s costume novel Rodney Stone [1896] (London: John Murray, 1948), pp. 231–42. 3. See Admiral Viscount Jellicoe, The Grand Fleet 1914–16 [1919] (London: Cassell, 1922), pp. 334 and 413; for further discussion of Nelson see Amy Sargeant, ‘Do We Need Another Hero?’ in Claire Monk and Amy Sargeant (eds), British Historical Cinema (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 15–30. 4. Stuart Legg, Jutland: An Eye Witness (London: Hart-Davis, 1966), p. 31. 5. Michael Paris, The First World War and Popular Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 53; Alex King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain (Oxford: Berg, 1998), p. 194. 6. Caroline Lejeune, ‘Cinema’, Manchester Guardian, 8 October 1927, 11; by 1931 Lejeune had revised her opinion, naming Hitchcock and Anthony Asquith (assistant to Bruce Woolfe and to Walter Summers on the script of Coronel and Falklands) as the two leading British directors. 7. Paris, The First World War, p. 57 and Andrew Kelly (indirectly), Cinema and the Great War (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 61–2, neither saying anything about the film itself; see also Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined (London: Pimlico, 1990), p. 446. 8. Winifred Ellerman (Bryher), ‘The War from Three Angles’ and ‘The War from More Angles’, Close Up, July 1927, 16–22, and October 1927, 44–8.


9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

91

Nevertheless, she praised the film (rare in the journal’s coverage of British cinema) for holding her attention. Cradock’s opposition was reported as far afield as France: see Cinémagazine, 19 November 1926; for Winston Churchill’s account, see The World Crisis 1911–14 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923), pp. 407–38. Churchill was initially invited to appear in the 1927 film but declined. See Kinematograph Weekly, 8 September 1927, 64 (also for indications of the scoring accompanying the film) and Parliamentary Debates: Commons, 211, 6 December 1927, 1174–5, 7 December, 1361–3, 14 December, 2290–92 and 2324; see also Kenton Bamford, Distorted Images (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), pp. 128–9 for critical reactions to The Luck of the Navy (Fred Paul, 1927), one of the dozen films already made with Navy cooperation. For critical commentary in Germany, see Ernst Jäger, ‘Seeschlachten bei Coronel und den Falkland-Inseln’, Berlin Film Kurier, 3 August 1928. Caroline Lejeune, ‘War Films’, Cinema (London: Alexander Maclehose, 1931), pp. 216–24; for an appreciation of ‘documentaries’ and reconstructions produced by Summers (a war veteran himself) in the 1920s and 1930s, see Rachael Low, A History of the British Film IV [1971] (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 181 and Documentary and Educational Films of the 1930s (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979), pp. 20–24. M. Foss, Der See und Kolonialkrieg I (Halle: Saale- Mühlmam, 1919), p. 157. For differences between HMS Invincible (broken by an explosion in the Battle of Jutland, with most of her crew lost) and HMS Inflexible (both powered by steam turbines, fired by coal and oil), represented in 1927 by (respectively) HMS Barham and HMS Malaya (both powered by steam turbines, fired by oil alone), see David K. Brown, The Grand Fleet: Warship Development 1905–23 (London: Chatham, 1999). Lord Fisher, with the help of Henri Detterding, succeeded in converting 45 per cent of British navy ships to oil: see Ludwell Denny, America Conquers Britain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930), pp. 229–30. Geoffrey Bennett, The Battles of the Coronel and Falkland Islands (London: Batsford, 1962), p. 119; see also Paul G. Halpern, A Naval History of World War I (London: UCL Press, 1994), pp. 88–100 and John Keegan, The First World War (London: Hutchinson, 1998), pp. 231–4. The trade papers The Bioscope, 22 September 1927, 45 and Kinematograph Weekly, 22 September 1927, 72–3 both single out this sequence for particular praise. Coward’s 1947 Peace in Our Time (Act I sc.3) notably invokes Nelson, while Terence Rattigan’s 1970 A Bequest to the Nation returns to the notion of Nelson as Romantic in both the literary and ordinary sense. Legg, Jutland, p. 143. ‘Admirals at a Trade Show – Naval Experts Delighted’, The Bioscope, 8 September 1927, 6: ‘Mr Ferraby… of the Daily Express, declared that the picture expressed clearly and fully in half an hour points which writers had been endeavouring to explain for five years’.


18. Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth [1933] (London: Virago, 1978), p. 271. 19. Arthur Mee, The Children’s Encyclopaedia III (London: The Educational Book Company, 1925), p. 1709. 20. See Romney article in the New Age, 20 June 1912, 174; also Adrian Conan Doyle, The True Conan Doyle (London: John Murray, 1945), pp. 19–20 for Arthur Conan Doyle’s accurate predictions of U-boat warfare. 21. Quoted in Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing (London: Granta, 2000), p. 59; see also Peter Beresford Ellis and Piers Williams, By Jove, Biggles! (London: W.H. Allen, 1981), p. 71. 22. See Lev Tolstoy, ‘Letter to an Uncommissioned Officer’ in Peter Mayer (ed.), The Pacifist Conscience (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966); also Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace [1795] (London: Allen and Unwin, 1903), p. 110. 23. Norman Angell, The Great Illusion (London: Heinemann, 1911), pp. vi, 27, 322–3; see also The Great Illusion Now (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938). 24. ‘Verdad’, New Age, 26 January 1911, 303–34 (and ensuing responses from socialist readers, contributors and from Angell himself); 23 March 1911, 483–4 and 30 March 1911, 507. Verdad continued anxiously to report the expansion of the German Navy. 25. Michael Howard, Clausewitz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 33 and 43. 26. See Iris Barry, ‘Austen Chamberlain Seeking to Ban Dawn’, Daily Mail, 1 March 1928, 11; Rex Ingram’s 1921 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts [1903–8] – a point of reference in 1914 and 1918 – similarly cast other worldly protagonists (see Hynes, A War Imagined, p. 39 and, for H.G. Wells and Maynard Keynes references, Amy Sargeant, ‘Utopia, Dystopia and Eutopia between the Wars’ in Laraine Porter and Alan Burton (eds), Scene-Stealing (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 2003), pp. 94–101. For a French review of Dawn, see Cinémiroir, 16 November 1928. 27. James Joll, The Origins of the First World War (London: Longman, 1992), p. 75; see also J. S. Bratton, ‘Of England, Home and Duty’, John M. Mackenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), pp. 83–4. 28. British Library Maps, 1070.(4) and 950.(185). 29. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), p. 10. 30. King, Memorials, p. 246; for ‘Old Lies’ see Wilfred Owen, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), pp. 182–3. 31. Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London: Faber, 1997), p. 8. 32. For Masterman’s invitation to Kipling to join Wellington House, see Hynes, A War Imagined, p. 26. 33. A. S. L. Faquharson (tr.), The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), Book II, p. 17.


93

34. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Lectures on Heroes: on Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History’, in Thomas Carlyle’s Works (London: Chapman and Hall, 1888), pp. 183–375; see also Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Superman’, A Nietzsche Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 232–48. 35. For Captain Scott’s last diary entry [29 March 1912] see John Carey (ed.), The Faber Book of Reportage (London: Faber, 1987), pp. 431–4; see also Frend’s 1952 adaptation of Nicholas Monserrat’s The Cruel Sea, in which ‘the only villain is the sea’.

7 Remembering the War in 1920s British Cinema Christine Gledhill

This chapter explores the presence of the Great War in 1920s British cinema. At first glance this takes two forms: the reconstruction of key battles, developed by Bruce Woolfe and Walter Summers at British Instructional, often discussed in terms of ‘record’ and ‘fact’; and fictions that use the war as material for melodramas, romances and social problem dramas. However, arguably the war haunts the films of the 1920s with a more pervasive and liminal presence. As Michael Williams has shown in relation to Ivor Novello, there are many ways in which films not directly addressing the war can suggest a ‘war touch’.1 This is particularly evident in films that dramatize competing types of masculinity, among which the figure of the ‘wounded man’ is prevalent. All three approaches catch up, directly or indirectly, echoes of wartime rumours, images, stories and myths of the kind recorded by Paul Fussell and Jay Winter.2 For example, Walter Summers’s Mons (1926) ‘includes in its documentary reconstruction the Major Tom Bridges story of rallying troops with a toy whistle and drum’.3 All are involved in a contested process of remembering and thus of constructing and circulating popular memory. This process continues beyond the films themselves in the complex discursive context of exhibition practices, reviews, journalistic articles and public responses in the press, feeding into wider debates and campaigns about both cinema and the most appropriate forms of public remembrance.4 Remembering involves two problematic processes: imagining (for those not at the front) and assigning meaning. Significantly, James Agate, drama critic for the Sunday Times, does not, as one 94

Remembering the Great War in 1920s British Cinema

95

might expect, valorize documentary reconstruction over fictional dramatization. Of Ypres (Walter Summers, 1925) he asks: Can it be that [Ypres]… is lacking, not in the way of lively or more pathetic anecdote, but of dramatic content and spiritual message? Presumably such a picture is intended to do more than reopen old wounds – it were intolerable else. The friend with me had lost two brothers at Ypres. He said: ‘The folks talked of coming to see this, but I shan’t let them.’ The point is that this picture is too obviously a photographic reconstruction of heroisms ending in death, and too little the embodiment of whatever meaning is to be found in this overwhelming tragedy… there is not enough of spiritual transposition to take the pain out of the picture.5 In this chapter I discuss in relation to such debates three exemplary fiction films – two ‘war-touched’ and one war story – as a way of cutting into these active processes of mediating past experience and memory construction. These are The Wonderful Story (Graham Cutts, 1922), Mademoiselle d’Armentiers (Maurice Elvey, 1926) and Miles Mander’s The First Born (1928).

Signs of the ‘war touch’ In configuring their dramatis personae and situations, the films of the 1920s resonate with wartime experiences and imaginings still vividly present in social life and popular culture. Four interweaving motifs provide a rough template against which to explore the work of these three films. 1. Ambivalence about traditional masculinity, now torn between the war’s demand for mechanized mass destruction and the standards of modern civil society based on rejecting violence and cruelty. This ambiguity produces as anti-hero the wounded man, physically and/or psychologically tortured such as we find from Comradeship (Maurice Elvey, 1919) and The Wonderful Story, through Reveille (George Pearson, 1924) and The Passionate Adventure (Graham Cutts, 1924) to The First Born and The Guns of Loos (Sinclair Hill, 1928). 2. A problematic shift in the symbolic function of the Victorian ‘true woman’, as middle-class women move out of the home and into


Jameson Thomas in Blighty.

public work formerly the preserve of men, or into publicly visible sexualized arenas formerly hidden from view, an ‘out-of-placeness’ vividly enacted in The General Post (Thomas Bentley, 1920), through Mademoiselle From Armentieres (1926) to Blighty (Adrian Brunel, 1927) and Kitty (Victor Saville, 1929). 3. The often ‘touching’ figuring of bonds between men that are then displaced onto rivalry for the woman, between childhood friends as in The Manxman (George Loane Tucker, 1916 and Alfred Hitchcock, 1928) and The Man Who Forgot (F. Martin Thornton, 1919), or brothers in The Wonderful Story and The Guns of Loos. 4. The role of the child as a symbol of regeneration to counter dysfunctional masculinity. from The Wonderful Story, Flames of Passion (Graham Cutts, 1922) and Pipes of Pan (Cecil Hepworth, 1923) through to Miles Manders’s The First Born. The birth or presence of a child sometimes restores the wounded male, or, as in The Man Who Forgot, Flames of Passion, The Manxman and The First Born, leads to his banishment from the film.


97

A young Herbert Wilcox, director of Dawn and producer of The Wonderful Story.

A ‘war-touched’ film: The Wonderful Story Graham Cutts’s The Wonderful Story is not about the war, but seems to have been recognized as a war-touched film. The originating tale by I. A. R. Wylie had made a deep impact on both Cutts (who is said to have taken the story to Wilcox and given up his job as exhibitor in order to direct it) and Herbert Wilcox, its producer.6 Wilcox links the film to his reading of Rupert Brooke, At Granchester in particular, which he describes as ‘a spiritual cry from someone ill-equipped to fight life itself, let alone resist death in action’.7 The story turns on the relation of Kate to two brothers, Robert and Jimmy, the one aggressively passionate and virile, the other gentle and companionable. On the eve of his wedding to Kate, Robert falls from a ladder and breaks his back. Thereafter, paralysed, he watches Jimmy’s slow infiltration into Kate’s affections and puts a curse on them. Graham Cutts’ picturization of this tale, however, laces the pathos of the war-wounded man with troubling hints about the psychosexual


economy of masculinity and female desire. For in wounding body and mind, rather than confirming masculinity, war infantilizes the male, reducing him to weakness and dependency on the nurturing woman. A striking articulation of this ambiguity is registered in a painting by Alfred Priest shown at the 1917 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. It depicts a young soldier, dying among his fallen comrades in a warravaged wood, crying out, as the title suggests: ‘Mother! Mother!’8 The assumptions about nurturing femininity locked into this image are indeed realized through heroines faithful to their blinded or warwounded men, from Elvey’s Comradeship to Sinclair Hill’s The Guns of Loos and Saville’s Kitty. In contrast, Cutts suggests the impact of war wounding on women in the frank naming of Kate’s dilemma. Following Robert’s accident a title asks: ‘She had loved this man – but now – were her feelings different?’ The answer is explored in Kate’s contrasting projections of Robert before and after the accident and then of their likely future, in which he appeals to her from a wheelchair. A title frankly acknowledging female desire comments: ‘He had swept her off her feet by his strength, his virility, his superb animalism. But now he was not that man any more’. With a shrug of resignation, Kate puts away her wedding gown, while the text brutally concludes: ‘The attributes she had worshipped in Robert Martin were dead, and her love for him was dead’. Kate’s refusal of the role of maternal helpmate with its implication of war-blighted relationships may well lie behind Kinematograph Weekly’s oblique suggestion that the film offers an ‘intensely human picturisation of what must be happening in many lives to-day’ and perhaps, also, the film’s failure at the box office.9 However, in their need to compensate the wounded man – so grimly realized in Herbert Langley’s contorted body, visually marginalized within the mise-en-scène of the new couple – the filmmakers turn back to high Victorian kitsch: a picture-postcard image of a newborn baby on a bed of lilies, floating from the sky ever nearer to the spectator. As Robert retracts his curse and is finally centred in the frame, cradling Kate’s newborn baby, with mother and father on either side, the regenerative significance of such popular imagery is capped by Wilcox’s memory of Rupert Brooke. Over a final image of a rural English lane this verse from Brooke’s 1912 poem ‘Song’ is superimposed: But Winter’s broken and earth has awoken And the small birds cry again


99

And the hawthorn hedge puts forth its buds And the heart puts forth its pain. In this film the impact of the war is dramatized as a potentially tragic family romance in which the impossible question of female desire is displaced in a renewed image of maternity. However, the route to this conclusion is arrived at through means characteristic of British filmmaking practices. Eschewing the concerted forward drive of narrative, the film makes an indirect response to the emotional dilemmas of post-war life through a collage of pre-existing images and literary echoes, much in the manner described by cultural historians such as Fussell, Winter and Gregory in the production of wartime memories.10

Remembering the war: Mademoiselle from Armentieres Press reviews and public controversies suggest the stakes in constructing memory, a remembering process exemplified by the inception and contextual relationships of Elvey’s Mademoiselle from Armentieres. At the same time the film suggests how the British cinematic practice of collaging pre-given stories and images was capable of producing a consensual reconciliation out of materials pulling in different social and cultural directions. By the mid-1920s the fighting front itself began to figure more prominently in war fictions, stimulated perhaps by the increasing number of widely popular documentary reconstructions of key battles such as Zeebrugge (H. Bruce Woolfe and A. V. Bramble, 1924), Ypres and Mons (Walter Summers, 1926),11 as well as competing films from America such as The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1926) and the controversial The Unknown Soldier (Renaud Hoffman, 1926). The plan to release the latter film during Armistice Week of 1926 produced widespread outrage and a concerted campaign led by Lady Cowan to ban it.12 The controversy suggests the degree to which contesting the memory and meaning of the war was a multifaceted struggle: for national pride and imperial domination, for national ownership of the war, for internal class control, as well as for different aesthetic values, all aligned against Hollywood. Thus the Sydenham Gazette reported, under the subhead ‘Whilst we made war, the Americans made movies’, a talk by Capt. R. Davies to the British Women’s Patriotic League.13 Davies


makes the oft-repeated claim that Hollywood sought world domination through the downfall of the British film industry by exaggerating American heroics while caricaturing the English. Central to the controversy, however, was the film’s aesthetic appeal and questions of taste. The construction of its story – featuring wartime unwedded romance – as a melodrama that permitted the now apparently dead soldier’s return at the moment of the burial of the Unknown Soldier was considered not only an affront to the many bereaved mothers and wives in the audience, but unforgivable commercial exploitation of ‘our most sacred emotions’.14 G. A. Atkinson wrote in the Evening Express: We confidently expected that the war, which with its store of great memories and great emotions has a dreadful fascination for Hollywood producers, would bring about their downfall. These melodramatic war-films have split Wardour Street in two.15 The Daily News – sympathetic to ‘the natural desire of Americans to take credit for the part they played in the Great War’ while admitting the film’s ‘obvious sob stuff which appeals to Americans’ – reveals the interesting fact that it was for the British market that an alternative ending was appended in which the solider ‘comes back alive in the hackneyed style of old melodrama’ (rather than his spirit appearing to his hospitalized wife in the American version).16 This may be an indication of Hollywood’s conception of Britain’s class-divided and backward-looking popular culture, or a miscalculation of the sensitivities of war-torn audiences. However, for all the righteous anger at Americans borrowing a ‘sacred title’,17 no one noted that the British memorialized their unknown soldier under the more imperial term ‘Unknown Warrior’.18 In contrast to such outright rejection, Elvey’s Mademoiselle From Armentieres, also mixing romance and war and released in the same year, was largely warmly received and was a box-office hit. The skeletal narrative of the film concerns the romantic cross-purposes that arise when a British Tommy, played by John Stuart, falls for the Mademoiselle (Estelle Brody) who serves in a behind-the-lines estaminet. Recruited by the allies to chat up a suspected French collaborator and German spy, she is unable to reassure her jealous lover before he marches to the front for the ‘big push’. Hence she follows


101

the troops into the trenches, is caught by the Germans and brought face to face with her captured, wounded lover. She then proves her innocence by crying ‘Vive La France, Vive Les Allies’. Woven into this tenuous narrative are front-line incidents and battle scenes, deploying official war footage in conjunction with vignettes of life in the trenches. Despite the apparent lift of an idea from The Big Parade (Mademoiselle’s frantic running alongside soldiers marching to the front as she searches for her lover), and despite some criticisms of the love affair and spy melodrama interlaced with its pictures of front-line life, the film was felt to be truer to British experience of the war than the competing American feature. So according to The Observer, cinema had offered: nothing better to replace Old Bill and his walrus moustache… The originality of the British film lies in its spirit. No boasting – the victory is won by the French – no unbroken lines marching under fire as if on parade, no stricken men shouting for glory’s sake and forgetting severe wounds. Instead, the stripling who, scandalous, came straight to the trenches from his mother’s care… Gratitude is owed… to that comely little person, Estelle Brody. Even her appearance in battle is not unduly extraordinary, so matter-of-fact and unheroic is she.19 Similarly, under the headline ‘Mademoiselle From Armentieres: A Reply to The Big Parade’, the Evening Standard argues: Mademoiselle’s following her lover into the trenches almost approached rather serious burlesque… [The film] does somehow reflect the British spirit hard to define but instantly recognisable… all the types, Tommy and officer, are finely chosen. The old man/ young man contrast is lifted clean out of filmishness into stark reality.20 Arguably this combination of ‘stark reality’ with ‘serious burlesque’ and ‘melodrama’ becomes acceptable through the film’s culturally grounded aesthetic strategies, which combine a degree of understated performance – achieving ‘stirring effects by sheer subtlety and restraint’ – with already acculturated story materials, still circulating


from the war in songs, images, documents and myths.21 Such ‘cultural documents’ blur the boundary between fact and fiction in that they are already shaped by the processes of memorializing. Loosening the homogenizing requirement of American cinema’s forward narrative drive, British filmmaking’s collage-like approach enables the film to dip into the war’s ‘store of great memories’, which, coming from different contexts, bring into encounter different voices, speaking to a range of audiences.22 Victor Saville’s unpublished account of the film script’s inception, based on a soldier’s marching song, exemplifies this contrary mix of cultural and generic materials, narrative strategies and personal memories: One day in early 1926, Bromhead told me someone had come up with a great title for a picture: ‘Mademoiselle from Armentieres’… The song… might be a bit of a soldiers’ la-de-da but the town Armentieres conjured up something else for me… grim night marches up the line, the mud and the shell holes half full of water, into which we tumbled, the shrapnel bursts overhead and the sudden freeze as the battalion concertina’d because a shell illuminated the sky… [and] jokes… the same as at Agincourt… For sometime I had been writing a story set in the part of France where I had been serving… a spy story is the essence of suspenseful drama… isolation in enemy territory.23 This mix of wartime experience and commercial savvy finds its sources in wartime myths. The film’s German spy, for example, donning his uniform with a self-satisfied leer into his mirror as the troops march up to the front, recalls Fussell’s account of a persistent frontline rumour featuring a ‘ghostly German Officer-spy who appears in the trenches just before an attack’.24 Mademoiselle herself, oscillating between actual behind-the-lines experiences and the fantasy of song, attains a magical reality for some reviewers, associated with another front-line legend: the Angels of Mons, who were said to have offered heavenly protection to British troops in retreat.25 So the Evening News captions a picture of Estelle Brody posed with the soldiers who acted in the film: ‘As famous and mythical in the war as ‘the Angel of Mons’, Mademoiselle From Armentieres comes to life in a new British film… and is proving to be a very charming person as played by Estelle Brody’.26 The Yorkshire Observer goes further in memorializing


103

Mademoiselle as a historical personage: ‘Now Mademoiselle From Armentieres is in preparation… to introduce that gracious lady whose memory has been perpetuated in song (if somewhat doggerel)’.27 This oscillation between myth and experience, characteristic of the life of rumour and myth-making during and after the war, was exploited in the film’s press-book, playing on Mademoiselle’s ambiguous moral identity: ‘Mademoiselle From Armentieres’ – magnetic title!… She was an intriguing character and still is. According to the composer of the soldiers’ song – Thomas Atkins, Esquire – she was a lady of uncertain age and doubtful virtue; it is precisely on this point that wives and sweethearts – to whom she was always a mystery – and ex-Tommies – to whom she was a god-send on a forced march – will be most curious. There was a persistent rumour of course, that ‘Mademoiselle’ was a living person who kept an estaminet and acted as a spy, but like many other war rumours, its origin was wrapt in mystery.28 The Stoll Herald was happy to exploit this ambiguity in its promotion of the film: Created on the stern rhythm of myriads of marching feet, the fame – or notoriety, if you will – of bewitching, tantalising little Mademoiselle from Armentieres has outlived the bitter memories of the Great War, and her name has been perpetuated along with those of its greatest heroes. Who was she – this fascinating, adorable, coquettish figure – and what part did she really play in the world’s most gigantic conflict?29 For some ex-servicemen and commentators, recognition and involvement depended on very different images and cultural motifs from those associated with romance. Under the heading ‘It was magnificent, but was it war?’, the Daily News reported ‘The Soldier’s View’. Norman Venner, commenting on behalf of O. C. Platoon, notes their appreciation of: the old soldier waiting to go over the top and cleaning his nails with the point of his bayonet; the hot water bottle filled with rum;


the faces in the front row of the concert party; the realism of the artillery bombardment… the general air of confusion, smoke and aimlessness in the battle pictures; the taped line leading to the front trench and the soldier’s mouth organ which was made in Germany.30 However, ‘the sight of Mademoiselle running about in a trench and not from Armentieres but America spoilt the effect’. For many it was not ‘Mademoiselle’ but ‘Old Soldiers Never Die’ – reportedly popular with new recruits and used by the old soldier to encourage a nervous youngster before going over the top – that was, James Agate noted, the focus of recognition and pathos for the audiences he observed at a recent crop of war documentaries and feature films.31 The film’s capacity to tap into and shape such diverse memories of shared experience was exploited in exhibition practices. Kinematograph Weekly reports the use of a live-action prologue – by the mid-1920s a common means of attracting audiences – for a Welsh screening: prior to the screening, the tabs across the screen parted, revealing the interior of a trench… within which sat five Tommies, four playing cards and the fifth grousing about the war… an aeroplane was faintly heard… When the noise… had grown to a roar the Tommies made a rush for the dug-out… when there was a terrific explosion and a flash as a bomb dropped from the plane… As the plane few away, the Tommies peeped cautiously around the side of the dug-out… The other Tommies started chaffing ‘John’ about the little girl he met up at the Estaminet at Armentieres, and… succeeded in getting him to sing the song, ‘Mademoiselle From Armentieres,’ all joining in the chorus, while a scrim at the rear of the trench was illuminated slowly by means of a dimmer, disclosing Mademoiselle’s vision. The tabs then closed and the picture was screened.32 The significance of such presentations as mediations between films and audience experience is spelled out in another Kinematograph Weekly report: Thousands of Sheffield people flocked to the Albert Hall to see a wonderful replica of an Army dug-out, created by Reginald T. Rea,


105

as a boost for ‘Mademoiselle from Armentieres’. So complete in its detail was this replica that ex-Service men could imagine themselves back in the trenches.33 While this may seem a publicity gimmick, it chimes with the increasing circulation of images and accounts of front-line experience, not only mediating personal reminiscence but constructing historical memory for the next generation. Fanteuil of the Yorkshire Observer, commenting on the popularity of the Woolfe/Summers battle reconstructions, argues: That young England is taking trouble to acquaint itself with the history of the war is the conviction of a number of cinema managers to whom I have spoken on the subject… Havoc, Ypres, Zeebrugge attract audiences almost all male and 50% postwar. At Ypres I watched closely for the psychological effect. No-one went for ordinary evening entertainment. Elder men were clearly making a pilgrimage, while the younger were seeking knowledge.34 Many commentators saw this process as a weapon in an anti-war struggle. Fanteuil approaches the pain of remembering as a necessary political lesson for the new generation: Despite protests against the production of war films because ‘they dig up old trouble’… pictures render invaluable service in showing the rising generation who escaped war by a few years the unnatural mode of life their elder brothers were called upon to assume during those four nightmarish years. Their lesson – to evolve statecraft to avoid repetition of 1914– 18 – needs to be driven home via the screen now on the impressionable.35 However, contrary to demands for the realities of trench warfare, Edward Wood in a Picture Show article on ‘Love and War’ argues for the inclusion of love interest to make war pictures into ‘powerful propaganda for peace’: It is not that we have less pity for the wounded… but in the scene of a parting we are moved not only by the pity, but there arises


within us a surging desire to stop the parting, with a vague and totally ineffective notion that we might thus stop the war.36

The war touch in the late 1920s: The First Born If the war touch discernible in The Wonderful Story evokes Edward Wood’s ‘pity’ for the wounded male body – for the ‘thousands of blinded and crippled men, who, but for the war, would normally have been in the full strength of manhood’ – my final example, Miles Mander’s directorial debut The First Born (1928), enacts a covertly politicized ‘war touch’ at the end of the decade. A story disliked by the trade press for its sordid and degraded central character, a lecher and would-be MP, its status as a war-touched film may seem doubtful. However, Mander clearly had much invested in the project: not only did he undertake direction for the first time and co-produce with Michael Balcon, but with the aid of Alma Reville and Ian Dalrymple he adapted the script from his stage play, Those Common People. And he undertook the leading role. Three features suggest links with earlier films. First is Miles Mander’s extraordinary performance as Sir Hugo Boycott. Mander had made a reputation for characterizing upper-class libertines. In Boycott, however, his wiry body twists and turns in a display of overdetermined, frustrated and aggressive desire, often presenting his angular back and contorted shoulders to camera, a palpable embodiment of class-bound masculine dysfunction. Second is the cause of his torture: his desire for a child and his doubt about the paternity of his first born, whose arrival brings him back to England after deserting his wife for a decadent existence in the colonies. Third is a sign given to the audience when he is accidentally killed by his mistress at the moment the election results make him an MP: his portrait in officer’s uniform falls from the wall. Kinematograph Weekly objects that the film ‘will, in the eyes of the unsophisticated place English society in the most unfavourable light’.37 This may indeed be an aim of Mander’s satire. In an interview with The Film Weekly he reveals that until the war he had been a true blue Tory. But, serving in the war from 1914 to 1919, ‘for the first time in my life, I came in contact with real people – genuine mankind. That changed my views – or rather gave me clear sight in place of mental astigmatism – and I am [now] a Fabian Socialist’.38 Certainly the elaborately filmed sequences of seduction across overladen upper-class


107

dinner tables, Boycott’s desertion of his wife for colonial decadence, his wife’s secret adoption of her hairdresser’s illegitimate baby in order to lure him home with an heir (as it turns out genuinely his) and his cynical perpetuation of nineteenth-century electioneering rhetoric combine to offer a bitter portrait of the social hierarchy that oversaw the Great War and hung on to its position through the 1920s. This chapter has attempted to explore British cinema’s engagement of the Great War by suggesting the active relationship between the war documentary, war story and war-touched film arising from their shared participation in a wider circulation of images, stories and myths; in contemporary debates about remembrance and memorializing; and in their conditions of exhibition and reception. Such interactions suggest the powerful exchange that takes place between aesthetic traditions, cultural documents, imagination and personal experience in the contest over the production of memory and meaning.

Notes Quotations from the review press are taken from Sidney Carroll’s Scrapbooks, BFI Special Collections. 1. Michael Williams, Ivor Novello: Screen Idol (London: BFI, 2003). Williams takes this term from an article by Edith Nepean in The Picture Show, 28 June 1924, 20. 2. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 3. Sunday Express, 12 September 1926. 4. See Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 1919–1946 (Oxford: Berg, 1994); Winter, Sites of Memory. 5. James Agate, The Contemporary Theatre, 1926 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1927), p. 350. 6. See Iris Barry’s Daily Mail article on Graham Cutts (18 August 1926) and Herbert Wilcox, Twenty-Five Thousand Sunsets. The Autobiography of Herbert Wilcox (London: Bodley Head, 1967), p. 51 for rather different accounts of how the story was found. 7. Wilcox, Twenty-Five Thousand Sunsets, pp. 26–7. 8. See The Royal Academy Illustrated, 1917, p. 93. 9. Kinematograph Weekly, 1 June 1922, 56. 10. Fussell, The Great War; Winter, Sites of Memory; Gregory, The Silence of Memory; Kinematograph Weekly, 1 June 1922, 56. 11. See Sunday Pictorial, 4 July 1926; Sunday Express, 12 September 1926: ‘Ypres was the British war-film which brought a million new patrons to


12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

the cinema theatres and broke most of the house records… Mons is so packed with vivid and unexpected thrills that to watch it is like reading history by flashes of lightening’; Daily Express, 13 September 1926; Daily Telegraph, 19 October 1926: ‘Mons has been seen by 120,000 during its first four weeks’ [at Marble Arch Pavilion]; Daily Express, 12 November 1926: ‘Mons, the British film which is estimated to have brought nearly 2 million new “recruits” to the cinema, continues its wonderful career’; Observer, 28 November 1926. See Sydenham Gazette, 9 July 1926; The Gentlewoman, 31 July 1926; Daily Sketch, 26 October 1926; Liverpool Post, 26 October 1926; Daily Mirror, 6 November 1926. For further press condemnations of the film see Daily Mail, 10 July 1926; The Referee, 11 July 1926; Daily Mail, 29 October 1926. Sydenham Gazette, 9 July 1926. Ibid. Evening News, 11 July 1926. Daily News, 10 July 1926. G. A. Atkinson, Daily Express, 9 July 1926. Fussell, The Great War, p. 175. The Observer, 8 November 1926. ‘Old Bill’ was the hugely popular character created by cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather. ‘Mademoiselle From Armentieres: A Reply to The Big Parade’, Evening Standard, 14 September 1926. Westminster Gazette, 15 September 1926. G. A. Atkinson, Evening Express, 11 July 1926. Victor Saville, ‘Shadows on a Screen’, unpublished memoirs held by BFI Special Collections, pp. 31–4. Fussell, The Great War, pp. 121–2. Ibid., pp. 115–16. Evening News, 26 July 1926. I am grateful to Mick Eaton for alerting me to an article by David Clarke, ‘Angels of War’, recounting his research into the manufacture of this myth continuing well beyond the war. See The Fortean Times, May 2003, 29–51. Yorkshire Observer, 30 July 1926. UK Press-book, BFI Library. The Stoll Herald, 28 February 1926. Daily News, 14 September 1926. James Agate, Sunday Times, 14 November 1926. Kinematograph Weekly, 2 June 1927, 57. Kinematograph Weekly, 16 June 1927, 51. Fanteuil, Yorkshire Observer, 30 July 1926. Ibid. Edward Wood, ‘Love and War’, Picture Show, 13 November 1926, 15. Kinematograph Weekly, 13 December 1928, 70. Film Weekly, 5 April 1930, 12.

8 Remembrance, Re-membering and Recollection: Walter Summers and the British War Film of the 1920s Lawrence Napper

Writing to Kinematograph Weekly in March 1927, an ‘exhibitor and old soldier’ expressed considerable resentment at what he saw as the glibness of Hollywood attempts to portray the Great War. Noting that many films that did not actually deal with the war nevertheless opened with the hero’s daring actions in France ‘braving shot and shell ad lib’, he suggested: This propaganda may go down with the Chinese or the lower caste of Hindoo, but to those who know the facts of the war it is only nauseating. If the Hollywood heroes had done so much fighting in France as they do on the films, the war would not have lasted quite so long. It is not pleasant for an exhibitor like myself who had the pleasure of seeing the doughboys arrive in the summer of 1918 to be so often viewing this stuff, and it is time that the producers had a very broad hint to this effect.1 This correspondent’s frustrations were clearly twofold, and one might argue that they closely matched a series of wider concerns about American domination of the exhibition sector in Britain that were the subject of widespread debate during 1927 in the run-up to the Cinematograph Act. On the one hand, there is a resentment over what is seen as the rewriting of history by Hollywood, one that accords America centrality even in European affairs and is then persuasively exported through cinema to the far corners of the globe. The fact 109


that cinema had a major bearing on a state’s international prestige – on the export of both a nation’s values and its reputation – was a point raised again and again during the Cinematograph debate, and Hollywood’s efficiency in this project, sometimes to the detriment of historical fact, is a concern that is raised even today.2 On the other hand, there is a concern with the way in which Hollywood deals with this history. The correspondent’s frustration with American war films is not only that they over-emphasize America’s involvement in the conflict at the expense of his own memories and contribution, but also that they use the war as simply so much local colour, a convenient opening for a trivial story. And of course, the triviality of Hollywood productions – their emphasis on novelettish narratives of interest only to shop girls – is another concern that is repeatedly raised in the debates around the need for legislation to protect a British industry capable of producing narratives more sympathetic to national (or official) concerns. In this chapter I want to draw attention to some of those British films made during the 1920s that deal with the Great War and consider the ways in which they are careful to negotiate a series of particularly fraught concerns for an audience that had been closely involved in the events of 1914–18, and was still struggling to digest their effects. I would suggest that these films are dominated by a concern with memory, with the linking of traumatic personal experiences of the conflict to a national narrative that gives both the personal and the national a meaning. It is the lack of this kind of concern in Hollywood films that, I would argue, grated so heavily on the Kinematograph Weekly correspondent quoted above, and it is furthermore a concern with which the narrative imperative of the classical Hollywood system was ill equipped to deal. As a result, many of the British films may seem curiously aberrant to audiences today. They are not constructed along classical lines. Their fictional space is not a sealed and organized system of meaning, they regularly step into and out of fictional modes, they mix fiction with actuality and with didactic symbolism, and they are generally formally odd. One might suggest that they are evidence of the crisis in language that Paul Fussell has so eloquently proposed for the post-war period, although in contrast to Fussell I would argue that, rather than struggling to find a new language with which to express meaning, these films struggle to accommodate a series of competing modes, both old and new.3

Remembrance, Re-membering and Recollection 111

To demonstrate this, I will focus on the work of a single filmmaker, Walter Summers, who worked consistently on war themes throughout the 1920s. Summers had entered the film industry before the war and his career was interrupted by it. He saw active service, emerging as a captain, and returned to filmmaking almost immediately. One might see his career as both a rebuff and a confirmation of one of the most persistent myths about the artistic response to the conflict during the 1920s. Fussell’s argument that the war initiated a crisis in language has its roots in this much more wholesale notion, most succinctly summed up by Herbert Reed in a Criterion review of Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front from 1929. Reed suggests: All who had been engaged in the war, all who had lived through the war years, had for more than a decade refused to consider their experience. The mind has a faculty for dismissing the debris of its emotional conflicts until it feels strong enough to deal with them. The war, for most people, was such a conflict, and they had never ‘got straight’ on it. Now they feel ready for the spiritual awakening...4 Reed’s theory of national traumatic mutism is not supported by the large number of war-themed films released in Britain throughout the 1920s. What perhaps is more difficult to identify, though, is the tonal register of these films. A follower of Reed and Fussell who hadn’t seen them might be moved to speculate that the early ones at least still relied on ‘melodramatic’ modes, tales of ‘derring-do’ imbued with notions of honour and glory – that they were, in effect, childish. And indeed to a degree this is the judgement that Rachael Low tends to make about them.5 My viewing of a sample of the films, however, leads me to suggest a slightly different model. I would like to propose three different registers to the remembering of wartime experience that are present to varying degrees in the films I am discussing. All rely on an understanding of the war as traumatic experience, and are crucially concerned with making sense of that experience rather than in suppressing its memory in the way in which Reed and others imagine. Indeed, they are all different expressions of the act of remembering, and they gradate from the public to the private. Summers’ films, I would suggest, are


particularly striking in the way they move between these three registers, but I do not want to imply that he is a unique filmmaker in this respect. I am going to characterize the registers as ‘remembrance’, ‘re-membering’ and ‘recollection’. Let me explain the distinctions. ‘Remembrance’ is a term I would use to express the kinds of official, public acts of remembrance of which the Cenotaph service in November is the most obvious exemplar. During the 1920s, of course, such acts were much more common and frequent than they are now; this is the period in which local war memorials were being unveiled in every town and village in the country. Today, with only a solitary Great War veteran surviving, it is worth trying to imagine oneself back in the 1920s when every man between the ages of 30 and 50 had lived through an experience of trauma that we can barely imagine, and every person in the country had first-hand experience of the early death of a friend or loved one. Remembrance – an expression of this private grief couched in public terms – was not an act of the imagination, but rather a strategy for linking a private loss apparently random and meaningless with a public discourse of meaning, a discourse about sacrifice, honour and moral debt. That linking of private experience with public discourse is a register easily identifiable in many films of the period. Most obviously, Remembrance (1927), sponsored by the British Legion, couches its triple personal narrative as a metaphor for the experience of legions of veterans helped by the British Legion. In more conventionally narrative films, moments of remembrance are often used as a frame for the personal narratives that follow. Walter Summers’ film A Couple of Down and Outs (1924) introduces its veteran hero, Danny, as a spectator at the Cenotaph service, and in a move common to many of the films I have seen, it inter-cuts staged shots of the actor Rex Davis looking (and emoting) with apparent ‘point-of-view’ actuality shots of the service itself. Danny’s presence at this national act of remembrance motivates a more private remembrance of his own – of the fighting itself. This is again signalled by the insertion of actuality footage (or, more precisely, reconstruction ‘actuality’ footage), its ‘authenticity’ signed by its obvious insertion into the smoother studio work of the fiction. The opening of the film, then, makes an explicit link between public and private remembrance, negotiated through the juxtaposition of ‘actuality’ and fictional shooting. This link, and its implications for the post-war society, are traced throughout the narrative. Danny, we learn, is finding post-war life


difficult. Down on his luck, he is unable to square his wartime sacrifice with his apparently superfluous economic status. Things come to a head when down at the docks he find his old wartime comrade, his horse, being sent to the knacker’s yard. The metaphor is too powerful; Danny assaults the sergeant in charge and steals the horse, precipitating a full-scale riot between other veterans forced into casual labour in the East End and the police. The clear implication of the scene is that such violence and resentment are always close to the surface among the disaffected veterans for whom the rhetoric of ‘remembrance’ has proved of little practical use.6 The film provides an antidote, nevertheless. After sheltering in an empty garage, the two fugitive pals are taken under the wing of Edna Best. It is ‘remembrance’ that prompts her policeman father not to turn Danny in when he discovers them – a motivation made explicit when he shows Danny a framed photograph of his own son in uniform, a more literal casualty of the war. This register of ‘remembrance’ also feeds into the historical reconstruction films most famously produced by H. Bruce Woolfe for British Instructional Pictures, three of which were directed by Summers. These films were regularly described as good box office by Kinematograph Weekly and appeared throughout the decade. They can easily be identified by their prosaic titles. The Battle of Jutland in 1921 initiated the series, followed by Armageddon (1923) about the Palestine campaign, Zebrugge (1924), Ypres: The Story of the Immortal Salient (1925), Mons (1926), The Somme (1927), The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands and Q-Ships (1928). British Instructional was not the only company making such films. These were advertised and undoubtedly understood at the time as public acts of remembrance, and yet I would argue that they also operate in a different, more specifically personal register – that of ‘re-membering’. That phrase may be familiar to readers of Joanna Bourke’s remarkable study of the effect of the war on the discourse around men’s bodies; in this case those corpses literally dis-membered by the conflict.7 There is an element of this meaning in my own use of the term, since, as I have noted, the remembrance of the dead always feeds into these films. However, I would also like to use the phrase ‘re-membering’ to express a more metaphorical form of reconstruction for the veteran survivors of the war. Literally, one might argue, these films put back together the fragmented and chaotic personal experiences of wartime


The Divisonal Baths, Ypres: The Story of the Immortal Salient (Walter Summers, 1925).

service into an understandable historical narrative. They might be said to stand alongside the numerous battalion histories of the war, which were also published throughout the decade and were largely intended for the veterans and loved ones of each individual battalion. The films themselves are very curious, and the main example I have seen, Ypres, is unlike any other feature film I know of from this period. It is a mixture of reconstruction, actuality footage, symbolism and explanatory intertitle. A silent documentary with knobs on, the film makes sense of the battle of Ypres (not in itself a discrete battle, but rather a catch-all title for the continued heavy fighting around that strategic salient). It organizes this fighting into an understandable series of causeand-effect narrative events: the first battle, the battle for Hill 60, the Air Battle, Mining the Messines, Passchendaele, the Belle Vue Spur and so on. Maps and diagrams increase the sense of the strategic importance of each individual action. Within the framework of this overarching narrative sense, the film oscillates between public and private acts of remembering. There is a section showing Poperinghe,


a popular village resort in Belgium where soldiers spent time on leave, in the past and the present, concentrating on the social club Talbot House. It seems designed to evoke happy personal memories of ‘Toc House’ for the many veterans who passed through the village, but it is followed by shots of the ‘“Toc House” society today’ meeting in London, and remembering lost comrades. The connection between individual personal contributions to the fighting and the historical importance of the battles as a whole is carefully handled. Recipients of the Victoria Cross are used to ‘stand in’ for the ordinary soldiers’ actual memories of fighting. Four VC recipients’ stories are told, and these are the only points at which actual personal experience of fighting is referred to. Of course, the fame of the VC recipients again makes clear the connection between personal battlefield experience and a meaningful historical outcome. Meaningful historical outcome, one might argue, is the insistent register of these films, even as they digest the massive casualty figures. Of Passchendaele the film concludes (in an intertitle): In a war of heroic deeds, Passchendaele will rank among the most heroic struggles. On 7th December after five months of gruelling fighting, the crest of that tragically famous ridge is gained. Thus I would suggest that the historical reconstruction films operated as a kind of intellectual bridge between private recollections and public history. They enabled veterans to make sense of their wartime experiences, to ‘re-member’ them as significant contributions to a greater whole: a perspective that, one might argue, was unavailable to them at the time they were actually fighting. Recollections of wartime experience as they were lived at the time – that is, without that wider perspective of individual endeavour as historically significant – form the final register that I would like to propose. Literally, this recalls the visceral sense of being in the trenches: re-experiencing trench life with all its suffering and death, and the overwhelming sense of helplessness and fate that is so pervasive in later personal reminiscences of the war. Journey’s End (1930) is clearly a key text in this register, and is often celebrated as the first film to provide such physical and psychological realism. I would suggest, though, that a much bleaker example of this ‘recollection’ register comes again from Walter Summers. His early sound film Suspense (1930) tells the story of a group of soldiers who take up a position


in a quiet part of the line. The platoon they relieve seem unaccountably traumatized. One of them even passes on a half-finished bottle of whisky with the portentous comment, ‘You’ll need this here more than we will’. The early sound technology is crucial to both the psychology and the narrative of this film. An insistent tapping provides the answer to the mystery. Below their dugout the Germans are tunnelling to lay a mine. When the tapping stops, the mine will be blown and they will all be killed. They can only wait and hope that the tapping will continue until they are relieved. The film does not move away from the dugout, but rather stays with the characters as each takes the psychological strain of their helpless situation. It is this helplessness that one might argue is the key psychological trope of war films dealing with ‘recollection’. It recurs in many narratives around the glut of war films that came out from 1927 onwards, but it can also be found in earlier films of the cycle. Walter Summers seems a key director here. A Couple of Down and Outs certainly has helplessness as a central theme, as has his The Lost Patrol (1929). The Lost Patrol is literally a lost film now, but it was adapted from a Philip Macdonald novel that renders its apparently vigorous sergeant helpless as he finds himself and his platoon trapped in a desert oasis while they are picked off one by one by Arab snipers. Intriguingly, the novel offers memory as a central strategy for the sergeant when he is in extremis as the last survivor, awaiting certain death but desperately trying to retain his sanity in order to have at least one last ‘go’ at the Arabs. His memory exercise is explicitly presented through the extended metaphor of a cinematograph show. That Walter Summers should be the director of such different films in which each of my key registers of remembering are variously dominant – ‘remembrance’ in A Couple of Down and Outs, ‘re-membering’ in Ypres and ‘recollection’ in Suspense – is an indication that such registers are not discrete within each film of the 1920s; they often work in conjunction with one another. Nor should these registers be understood as hierarchical according to whether they appropriately deal with the war in a naïve or adult fashion, as the popular valorization of Journey’s End and All Quiet on the Western Front suggests. Rather, they all circulate together as part of a general discourse about making sense of the traumatic experience of the war in the 1920s – a decade, in Britain at least, where remembering was both a difficult and a necessary activity.


Heroic action in Ypres: The Story of the Immortal Salient.

Notes 1. Kinematograph Weekly, 17 March 1927, 44. 2. See for example the furore that greeted the release of U-571 (Jonathan Mostow, 2000). 3. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 4. Herbert Reed in The Criterion, July 1930, quoted in Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 45. 5. Rachael Low, The History of the British Film 1918–1929 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971). See for instance her judgement on Land of Hope and Glory, p. 38. 6. The film indeed seems to invite reference to the industrial unrest that characterized the early 1920s and culminated in the General Strike of 1926. Although its initial release predates the strike, it was nevertheless popular enough to be reissued in March 1927, advertised as ‘A Revival of the Most Popular British Film’: Kinematograph Weekly, 3 March 1927, 23. 7. Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), p. 210.

9 ‘Fire, Blood and Steel’: Memory and Spectacle in The Guns of Loos (Sinclair Hill, 1928) Michael Williams

The Guns of Loos (Sinclair Hill, 1928, henceforth Loos) is set against the backdrop of the eponymous battle of 1915, as two soldiers, John Grimlaw (Henry Victor) and Clive (Donald Macardle), find their mental and physical fortitude tested on the battlefield. Public and private spheres meet and compete as both men are also fighting to win the affection of Diana (Madeleine Carroll in her screen debut), a Red Cross nurse in England. All this is juxtaposed against the growing tension of a workers’ dispute at Grimlaw’s Steel Works, which now operates as a munitions factory. This chapter explores the ways in which the film’s complex iconography addresses the mythic home/ front divide, particularly through the duality of its protagonists, and issues of history, remembrance and modernity as the audiences of 1928 were invited to recall the events of 1915.

Primitive forces Oswald Mitchell, Stoll’s studio manager, boasted to fan magazine Picture Show that Loos was conceived as a prestige production for the studio: ‘we may expect to see something which will not only vie with foreign productions, but which will outstrip them, in story value, in acting, in direction and in photography’.1 Indeed, this social and aesthetic agenda is set by the film’s opening sequence. With the portentous first title – ‘in moments of national crisis, primitive forces take hold of a man/they sweep him to destruction or to salvation’ – a sense of dualism emerges, constructing an opposition between culture and primitivism, moral degeneration and redemption. Significantly, as we 118

‘Fire, Blood and Steel’

119

read these words, the sculpture of a muscular male body fades in on the left of the frame; but what at first appears to be a figure of classical strength and integrity is revealed on closer inspection to be weak and vulnerable, as modernist diagonals fragment the frame, striking it like projectiles. The man also appears damaged, bracing himself on a crutch, questioning the ideal. Next, as the figure is engulfed in darkness, the date ‘1915’, apparently fashioned out of mud itself, grows large on the screen as we are introduced to ‘A little mining town in France, cowering beneath the steel hail of contending armies; a name destined to loom large in history – LOOS’. The film’s historical address recognizes that the events of that year will have heightened retrospective significance for 1928 audiences who will realize the less than glorious outcome of that battle – a ‘life-destroying cataclysm’ is how diarist Vera Brittain described it – despite its being initially publicized as one of the war’s first successes.2 Another striking image follows, as the rain-soaked face of a soldier, again deliriously magnified on the screen, expressionistically faltering in camera focus to project anxiety and the noise of his protest, screams to the audience: ‘Shells! Shells! For God’s sake, give us SHELLS!’ At this moment his mouth almost engulfs the screen, he seems both terrified and terrifying and, like the distorted image of Grimlaw’s traumatized face from the press-book, constitutes a key motif of the film. One of the many accomplished montage sequences follows as the man’s mouth dissolves into the gaping barrel of a gun, linking the danger from German shells to the absence of British ones with which to counterattack (at a time when Allied forces were outnumbered ten to one in terms of available ammunition), a vulnerability mapped directly onto the male body. The front is thus connected to Grimlaw’s Works, where we now see its workers toil. Yet Grimlaw is no simple saviour, as is immediately illustrated by the title: ‘In answer to the cry for shells, John Grimlaw, ironmaster, had become John Grimlaw, slave-driver’. Rather than associating ‘Blighty’ with cosy imagery of hearth and home (a real absence in the film), we see men, stripped to the waist, shovelling coal into the furnaces of Grimlaw’s Steel Works; an exaltation of the worker through an iconography of fire, steel and the hard male body fuelling machines in the fashion of the Soviet Montage films that the Film Society had been showing in London. This is a modern, problematic body, which borrows from Futurism in its


potential energy and speed, and also from German Expressionism, as men become synonymous with the machine. Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926) is perhaps the key reference point here, with its depiction of alienated workers driven remorselessly into the ground to be eaten up by demonic machines that serve the masters. Indeed, only two months before the trade show for Hill’s film, a serialization of Metropolis in Picture Show magazine, accompanied by the image of a worker struggling with machinery, is introduced with the lines: ‘Men of iron, women of steel! Motors instead of hearts; hate instead of love! Human Machines!’3 Like that film, Loos is obsessed with the idea of being engulfed, changed and damaged by the (war) machine. An uneasy vocabulary of wounded, and potentially wounded, heroes, masters and slaves is thus present from the outset, and what would be the ideal, the Superman even, is also rendered problematic by the film’s visual narrative. On the one hand, Grimlaw is a tyrant, shot in pointedly propagandistic style from below, empowering him within the frame as he commands the workers to double production even if it ‘kills the lot of us’. The worker body is thus equated with that of the mud-encrusted soldier, as one of the workers exclaims: ‘Same as ever! Takes no notice of yer than if yer was a bit of dirt’. But Grimlaw is also the saviour, injuring himself as he grasps hold of a pulley chain to save worker Danny (Bobby Howes) in a sudden accident. ‘But for ’im, they’d be picking up yours truly with a shovel!’, Danny observes, his trench humour highlighting the awful conditions in the factory. While the workers in The Guns of Loos are eulogized through the retrospective lens of Soviet propaganda by going on strike, they are also seen to imperil the men at the front, who depend on the shells to protect their own, even more vulnerable bodies. There is an irony here: the men and women who manufacture the shells are not only synonymous with machine-like efficiency, but are also complicit with the execution of a war that 1928 audiences would have viewed with ambivalent feelings. The Battle of Loos (28 September–14 October 1915) resulted in some 60,000 British casualties, crowned by a retreat from a German counter-attack after some early Allied success at gaining territory (necessitating the ‘saving of the guns’ of the film’s title), and was also remembered for the failed early use of gas by the British, in which a change of wind direction blew gas back on their own men.4 The 1915 strike, moreover, is one that resonated not only


121

with the more widespread strikes and shortages of 1917, but also the potentially more inflammatory industrial and, for a moment, potentially revolutionary (perhaps a subtext of the iconography here) unrest of the 1920s, including the General Strike of 1926, only a year before production began on Hill’s film. Labour was indeed dangerous in such factories, with the ever-present risk of explosions and contact with poisonous substances such as lyddite. This is in addition to the shocking fact that while nine servicemen died per hour in 1915, twelve babies died per hour in Britain due to poverty and poor housing conditions, exacerbated by the concentrated workforce required for city factories, with frozen wages despite costs of living rising by over a quarter each year during the war.5 However, the quite genuine grievances of the workers are overlooked at the end of the film and it certainly has a strong, albeit belated, propaganda element; thus Lloyd George’s comment to Hill, ‘In wartime this film would have been worth a division’, was widely exploited in Stoll’s publicity.6

Dissolved frontiers One of the film’s most extraordinary shots occurs when a line of dancers at a farewell ball is superimposed on the image of troops marching to the trenches, thus enabling the audience to view both the home and the front, and therefore the possible present and future fates of those concerned. This happens during the ball at Lady Cheswick’s house (the mother of Diana and adopted mother of Clive), a grand abode of fading aristocracy where upper/middle classes celebrate decorously above, while the working class, namely those employed at Grimlaw’s factory, revel in Bacchanalian excess below stairs; all classes celebrate simultaneously but only in parallel. Rather than the battle itself, the central narrative of Loos is driven by the device of a love triangle, which interrogates the themes of choice and personal agency, particularly along the home/front axis. Diana’s two suitors both propose to her at the ball, starting with Grimlaw. However, she is troubled by the kind of schizophrenic identity to which the film’s opening titles alluded, explaining: ‘You see, I know two John Grimlaws. One I admire... the other is heartless, a brute without feeling for anyone... which is the real John Grimlaw?’ But she is equally unimpressed by Clive’s rather naïve proposal, despite his being presented as more youthful than Grimlaw, a quality


Revels below stairs before leaving for the Front in The Guns of Loos.

that would usually be in his favour. Grimlaw’s direct manner and imposing physical presence contrast with Clive’s dreamy disposition (a comparison emphasized by lighting effects), one title relating that he found the war crisis ‘imaginative, vivid, grim, inspiring’ to his artistic sensibility. The theme of romantic choice catalyses the imagery of anguished male faces that haunt the hermeneutic world of the film and its publicity, as in distributor New Era Films’ tradeshow advertisement, which emphasized the physical and psychological contrast between the men: ‘The dramatic story of a man of iron who, like iron, breaks – of an idealist and a dreamer, whose ideals are shattered – And of a lovely English girl who is an inspiration for both’.7 Continuing the metaphors of metal and mettle, Picture Show put it: ‘the two men go to war – but in the face of fire, blood and steel, Henry Victor becomes a craven coward’.8 This aesthetic vocabulary – apparent in the opening titles and the scene of John’s breakdown on the front as Clive taunts him as a ‘filthy coward!’, saying: ‘the slavedriver! The Superman! How they’ll laugh and how Diana will loathe


123

you!’ – is at times overtly Nietzschean. Indeed, the philosopher’s words ‘Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman – a rope over an abyss’ could almost be a tagline for the film.9 What we might most usefully take from these references is the notion of a moral and physical dilemma so profound that it tests the very idea of the self and of human value, sometimes splitting the self in two; a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ effect, perhaps, the psychological syndrome popularly attributed to many shell-shock sufferers.10 As Grimlaw remarks after being rejected: ‘Diana. I’m going to make a fight for you – a fight against myself if need be!’ Grimlaw’s words evoke the ubiquitous metaphor of the war as a crucible of masculinity, such as that discussed by Christopher Isherwood: Like most of my generation, I was obsessed by a complex of terrors and longings connected with the idea ‘war.’ ‘War,’ in this purely neurotic sense, meant The Test. The test of your courage, your maturity, of your sexual prowess. ‘Are you really a man?’11 The language with which the fan magazines discussed Loos also echoes these types and the sense of choice, with Picture Show in particular describing Clive and Grimlaw as ‘the weak one’ and ‘the strong one’ respectively, as it notes that every cast member had been deliberately typecast.12 With the notion of choice and these types established, the film now brings us to that dissolve between the home and the front. An amputee veteran conspicuously enters the ballroom and is greeted in the centre of the frame. Following this image we witness a remarkable visual transition from a literal home front, consisting of a wide arc of men and women at the ball. As they stand with their arms entwined (in the fashion of ‘Auld Lang Syne’), the camera tracks back and pans down, leaving them as a row of figures at the top of the frame, as the remainder of the image below them dissolves into a startling composition of men walking in silhouette (from left to right) across the skyline of the Western Front. The home and the front are thus ostensibly united in the same frame. Moreover, the interconnectiveness of the imagery is underscored as we then see men in the far distance on the front walking in the opposite direction, from right to left, as shells explode in the air. If those in the foreground were heading to the front line, perhaps those in the background, a visual step towards the home front, are heading back


to Blighty, possibly with a ‘Blighty’, an incapacitating injury like the man who had just arrived at the ball. There might also be an implicit element of accusation here, for it is the class ‘upstairs’ that is seen to dispatch the men to war, and towards whom the injured return to present their bodies of evidence.

The ‘big show’ One sequence at the front documents the importance of theatre and performance to British cinema of the 1920s, but more specifically the kind of theatrical perceptual experience of war on the part of British soldiers highlighted by Paul Fussell and evidenced throughout the film in phrases such as ‘there’s a big show on in France’.13 Christine Gledhill, discussing this scene, observes not only that there is an audience of weary servicemen in front of the stage, but ‘the camera set-up from behind them looks beyond the performers through an opening at the back of the improvised stage, to where armoured vehicles are preparing for the front – the “real” Theatre of War’.14 The bawdy drag act that Danny performs here, evoking the freedoms of the Music Hall, certainly creates a space of performative freedom between the exhausted troops on one side and on the other the preparations for what immediately follows, which 1928 audiences would know to be a fateful battle. It is, however, significant that officers Grimlaw and Clive do not appear as able to express emotion as the largely working-class servicemen around them, underscoring the class divide of the farewell ball. Neither do they sing along as freely as their men when the sheet music for ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, the trench hit of 1915 (music by Ivor Novello, with lyrics by Lena Guilbert-Ford), is conspicuously placed on the piano and a tenor leads the men in song. As the camera pans across the wistful faces of the men, the mood has shifted completely. The ‘message’ of this song, as I have discussed elsewhere, is simple and appealing: that in darkness and suffering lies hope, which, as composer and now film star Novello told Picture Show in 1922, ‘came just at the right time during the war’.15 The song addressed both those tending the titular fires at ‘home’ and the ‘boys’/‘lads’ at the front and, importantly, negotiated the mixed feelings soldiers and noncombatants held for each other. Throughout 1915, the music and lyrics of ‘Home Fires’ became an anthem of resilience and solidarity,


125

no more so than for those men who had returned from the front and found in the haunting song some measure of a collective bond with comrades lost, injured or still fighting overseas.16 As Toby Haggith has noted, ‘Home Fires’ was subsequently included in the musical arrangement suggested to accompany screenings of The Battle of The Somme (British Topical Committee for War Films, 1916), played during the final section, ‘The Devastating Effect’.17 At Christmas 1915, thus in the period immediately after the Battle of Loos, ‘Home Fires’ became the leading pantomime song in the West End and provinces alike. What is significant about this is the way in which the song became rooted in the social performance of emotion, an emotion of hope and of imminent loss. As the Nottingham Guardian noted of one pantomime attended by some 2300 wounded soldiers: ‘No-one could have heard this great audience of men who have returned after looking death in the face singing the refrain without realising to the full all its pathetic significance’.18 ‘Home Fires’ is deployed in Loos for the ambivalent chord it strikes when evoked in public performance and to document the public/private acts of memory and longing of 1915, but also to register the equivocal feelings of remembrance for the men and women of the 1920s. As Christine Gledhill discusses elsewhere in this volume, remembering in these post-war films involves both ‘imagining’ for those at home and ‘assigning meaning’, thus, in turn, actively fashioning historical memory between what has been personally witnessed and culturally produced. However, John and Clive are actively participating in the song, for we see the image of Diana superimposed above them on the screen. This vignette borrows directly from any number of trench postcards circulating during the war, including ones depicting this very song, and is a familiar trope of films of this period. These uneasy bodies of memory and melancholic fantasy were also evoked by the diary of British nurse Vera Brittain, frustrated by the lack of news from her partner Roland Leighton, who is heading towards Loos. With little news reaching home, Brittain finds herself daydreaming in public spaces about her ‘missing’ lover, particularly while at the theatre.19 Brittain’s account also points to the topical significance underscoring the love-triangle structure of Loos, and a great number of films of the 1920s. Brittain is not only loved by Roland, but also his close friend, Maurice Ellinger, who has been sent back from the war to recover from a nervous attack. One night Brittain has disturbed dreams


about her choice between the men, which she proposes as the basis of a play, the three leading characters being ‘more or less’ autobiographical.20 Such personal and public dramas clearly resonate with the choice of Diana in Loos and, more frivolously, the star contests of fan magazines that invite the audience to judge their favourite stars as men. Picture Show’s ‘Ladies Prefer — ?’ cover feature, for example, presented a gallery of male profiles for readers to choose from. Inside the magazine, we are helpfully informed that Loos’ Henry Victor is in the ‘athletic and virile kind of hero category’.21 The real women, and men, of 1928 were living with the consequences of those choices.

Dramatic intensity Thus ‘Home Fires’ in the film is both ‘business as usual’ – the war song is part of the show and the theatre of war – but equally perhaps, looking back on 1915 from 1928, there is a touch of ‘goodbye to all that’ filtering through. The song acts as a catalyst: the thoughts of the men turn to Diana, and then to themselves as they realize that her choice between them will be determined by their performance on the battlefield. Immediately after the theatre scene, we find the men in a chapel, now within the sight of God as well as the judgement of Diana, echoing the earlier confrontation scene in the dugout. Clive’s marvellous exclamation ‘You swine! I helped you find your manhood and now you mock me!’ brings the narrative elements of war, masculinity and sexuality sharply into focus, as Grimlaw doubts the other man’s ability to kill him for cowardice. Yet just as these mutual rivalries have reworked their masculinity, what is at issue now is their perception of Diana’s gaze and the question: ‘What would Diana say if she could see us now?’ The war thus becomes a mirror, producing a looking-glass-self as if Diana – one remembers her mythic forebear Diana the Huntress here – could actually witness any ‘unmanly’ behaviour; decided on their action, they join their company as it prepares to depart for battle. A title now asserts that it is 25 September 1915 and the mud-encased word ‘Loos’ looms once more on the screen, returning us to a more overtly historical framework and the ‘actualities’ of war. The film certainly recreates the terrain of the battle convincingly, closely resembling contemporary photographs of the locale, complete with the iconic pithead known by Tommies as ‘Tower Bridge’. While


127

some shots may have been filmed in France, at least the majority of location filming took place in Essex, including the extraordinarily kinetic saving of the guns sequence. The popular press carefully constructed set reports that conveyed the sense of authentic danger that audiences could expect. Picture Show, for example, declared that the battle sequences ‘were realistic enough to warrant the cry of “any casualties”?’, particularly one shot, purportedly the result of an accident but included in the film, in which a gun carriage overturned.22 The film underwent three months’ preparation and two months’ shooting, with many scenes reputedly based on the director’s own war experiences. Indeed, the press-book indicates that Hill, who had himself served for four and a half years during the war, ‘arranged that the whole company – the majority of whom were ex-servicemen, should live under military discipline and in camp whilst the scenes were being made’.23 It was the film’s visually shocking deployment of the Magnascope process, however, that had most impact with critics. Magnascope was an in-projector big screen process developed by Lorenzo del Riccio at Paramount and first demonstrated in the UK in 1924. The projected image was tripled in size by removing a special mask for instant dramatic effects at key moments during screenings; a process also deployed in other war films in the 1920s, including The Big Parade and Wings (William A. Wellman, 1927).24 For Loos, as Variety observed, Magnascope was ‘switched in on sequences of saving the guns, with upward pit shots making horses and wheels rush out of the screen’, thus provoking, for the dizzying sequence where the gun battery races across the screen (often dubbed ‘the Ben Hur shot’ after Fred Niblo’s 1925 film), the biggest round of applause from audiences.25 Despite being restricted to selected cinemas only, Magnascope was a major attraction for the film as it attempts to ‘in-corporate’ the audience in the physical diegetic experience, blurring the boundaries of performance, proscenium and spectator body as the image literally expands into the auditorium. The film’s reception, nevertheless, also alludes to a sense in which the impact was just too much, such as the faces and objects looming ominously into vision throughout coming too close for comfort, like the scarred faces of wounded veterans in Abel Gance’s J’Accuse (1919). Thus Lionel Collier in Kinematograph Weekly contrasted the ‘real dramatic intensity’ of the ‘war atmosphere’ and Grimlaw’s breakdown with what he felt to be the jarring


artificiality of the Magnascope scenes.26 Likewise, The Bioscope praised the ‘spectacular military effects’ that produced ‘as convincing a picture of modern warfare as has yet been shown on the screen’, but was overwhelmed by the seemingly excessive use of close-up images.27 Clearly, the film’s visual register had a strong and sometimes deleterious impact on its 1928 viewers, creating the impression of a coherent narrative history undermined by the shock of the image, echoing the traumatic experience of many after the war. Once the race ceases and Grimlaw falls wounded, the film continues to be unsettled and unsettling, with a visual vocabulary that veers between melodramatic fantasy and verisimilitude, as a hand-held camera wanders towards the figure who has crumpled into the dust. The stage is once more set for another transition, as the two men return home to have their self-image once more renegotiated.

‘I have come to bring you back’ The final reel addresses the psychological and physical change in the male protagonists, rendering both the disjuncture and personal redemption of their return to Blighty. Grimlaw has changed more than Clive, and indeed Clive’s significance is in the way he is not Grimlaw, which is made apparent when he is first seen at Cheswick Hall as his adopted mother enters the room. Knowing only that a man has arrived, Lady Cheswick hesitantly asks ‘Is it – is it John?’ as she approaches the armchair by the fire, its back obscuring her view of its occupant. Her uncertainty at who is there is mixed with a hint of dread at what is sitting there, being unaware of the severity of his injuries. The difficulty in reconciling the home with the front is exemplified by an upside-down shot, a jarring foregrounding of apperception explained as the inverted point of view of Clive tilting his head to look over the back of the chair at Cheswick’s approach. On entering, Diana also fears the nature of Grimlaw’s condition, asking whether he has been ‘badly injured’, anticipating the next sequence in which he returns to his factory. But that scene is only reached via a shot of Lloyd George’s letter to the Daily Mail urging the strikers to return to work, intertwining the body politic of the solder and worker with which the film began. The factory is now rendered expressionistically as a chiaroscuro mise-en-scène transformed by Grimlaw’s trauma. Comparisons to James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931)


129

A blind John Grimlaw (Henry Victor) returns from the front in The Guns of Loos (Sinclair Hill, 1928).

are irresistible as Grimlaw enters, appearing as a shadow, taking faltering steps with outstretched hands into the workshop.28 A shot of the factory siren recalls similar motifs in Metropolis, while a close-up of Grimlaw’s agonized face precipitates a furious industrial montage of wheels, motors and machines, presumably recalling the noise that should be heard now and the deafening sound that first affected him in France. A long shot finds Grimlaw isolated, framed within a rectangle of light in the darkness as, Christ-like, he raises his hands to the ceiling, the workers recognizing that he has been blinded at the front as they draw close to him. The redemption of Grimlaw, the slave-driver who, it is revealed, saved his Battery, persuades the workers to return to restore production. The Tommies, he relates, are ‘silent and helpless’ without shells, declaring: ‘I let thoughts of self sway me out there. I played the coward… but a better man than I brought me back to myself… I have come to bring you back’. The complexity of the idea of ‘return’


here is striking, again constructing a sense of circularity and conflating the home and war fronts, preaching to a late 1920s context of rising psychological malaise relating to the war and social and industrial discontent. Grimlaw’s epiphany also works to resolve the other narrative enigma, that of Diana’s choice; ‘I know who is the real John Grimlaw now’, she observes. With a cry of ‘I don’t know about the men, but us girls is going back NOW!’, it is the women who now take action to set the machines in motion and restore the war effort, the men following on behind. Furthermore, in the film’s final move in its play on vision and gender, we now cut to a somewhat ghostly, soft-focus image of Diana’s face, not, as it would first seem, a signal of Grimlaw’s returning vision, but rather the lack of it for, as Clive observes, ‘she’ll be his eyes now’. As if in another intertextual allusion to Metropolis, the heart and conscience of Diana unite and temper the hand of the man of steel. The factory fires burn once more as the machine montage returns and Diana is seen embracing Grimlaw, who is lower in the frame, in a final image of reconciliation.29 Grimlaw has been rendered heroic, ironically at the very moment of his incapacitation through trauma, while romantic suitor Clive becomes a mere bystander. Male self-sacrifice is married to female emancipation, albeit at the service of men and war, and it could even be argued, as the cruel stare of Grimlaw is replaced by the female gaze of Diana, that there is a feminization of the male here, or at least a recognition of the contribution of women to the war effort and a nervous nod from post-war male idols (the type embodied by Clive in particular) to their forebears. Nostalgia, like trauma, is a resistance to history, disturbing and rejecting the present with images of the past. In looking back from 1928 to the mud of Loos, a real nostalgie de la boue, Hill’s film appears to seek an imaginary turning point of social and gender emancipation and the redemption of individual sacrifice: everyday men and women who, like the Superman, would not follow the bourgeois world without question, but who ultimately would not disturb the system unduly. It is as if the film were seeking to escape the future from which it projects this vision, in which society had once more seemed to break down in conflict as the traumas of the past were increasingly being relived in 1920s popular culture and in the growing number of veterans suffering psychological disorders. Nostalgia is both flawed and empowered in being illusory; the fact that one


131

cannot ‘really’ escape one’s context merely fuels the desire to do so. Reversing the same logic, trauma, as Cathy Caruth has explored, is being possessed by a history that one cannot contain: a traumatic event that ruptures the present, and that is indeed experienced in the present as if a vivid flashback.30 However, in its schizophrenic study of the machines of war and industry and its sight-assaulting imagery of magnified traumatic spectacle, Loos documents the war’s irreconcilable logic. The film deployed every cinematographic device at its disposal to put its audience back into its mise-en-scène, and as its critical reception demonstrates, its assaultive aesthetic emphasized visual immediacy and experience to the point of affective disorientation. Through themes of choice, undermined by a strange fatalism, the love-triangle imagery, visually superimposed onto the ‘Home Fires’ sequence, not only points to choosing what kind of man you want to be, but, more significantly, how you want to be remembered.

Notes Thanks to David Cobbett for comments on drafts of this chapter. 1. Edith Nepean, ‘Round the British Studios’, Picture Show, 26 November 1927, 21. 2. Vera Brittain, diary entry for 4 February 1916, in Alan Bishop (ed.), Chronicle of Youth: Vera Brittain’s War Diary 1913–1917 (London: Book Club Associates, 1981), p. 314. 3. ‘Metropolis’ serialization, Picture Show, 1 October 1927, 6. 4. The actual guns seized by the 20th London Regiment during the battle were also deployed for promotional purposes, arranged in front of the Prince of Wales Playhouse in Lewisham and accompanied by men from the regiment. ‘Loos Guns at Lewisham’, The Gazette (Sydenham, Forest Hill and Penge), 8 February 1929, 1. Thanks to Janice Healey. 5. Richard Van Emden and Steve Humphries, All Quiet on the Home Front: An Oral History of Life in Britain during the First World War (London: Headline, 2004), p. 228. 6. Max Breen, ‘A Silver Jubilee of the Silver Screen’, Picturegoer, 7 August 1937, 21. 7. New Era Films advertisement for The Guns of Loos, Kinematograph Weekly, 12 January 1928, 21. 8. Edith Nepean, ‘A Stoll Triumph’ (‘Round the British Studios’), Picture Show, 26 November 1927, 21. 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (London: Penguin, 1969; trans. R. J. Hollingdale), p. 43. 10. Pat Barker references this condition in her Regeneration trilogy: see The Eye in the Door (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 134.


11. Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties (1938), pp. 75–6, quoted in Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 110. 12. Edith Nepean, ‘Round the British Studios’, Picture Show, 26 November 1927, 21. 13. See Fussell, The Great War. 14. Christine Gledhill, Reframing British Cinema 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion (London: BFI, 2003), p. 15. 15. See Michael Williams, Ivor Novello: Screen Idol (London: BFI, 2003); ‘The Songs Everyone is Singing’, Picture Show, 29 April 1922, 18. 16. By February 1916, the song had been translated into at least six languages, including French, Russian and Italian, and had sold over one million copies. Yorkshire Post, ‘Song at the Front’, 5 February 1916. 17. This segment marks a change in tone from the stark images of the dead that ended the previous section, and moves towards the more ambivalent images of the aftermath. Likewise, the suggested inclusion of ‘Home Fires’ follows immediately from Elgar’s ‘Idylle’, played as the Essex Regiment wash ‘at a wayside pool’, and a roll call of the Seaforth Highlanders, accompanied by the eighteenth-century Scottish lament ‘The Flowers of the Forest’, the latter traditionally used to mourn lost relatives. ‘Home Fires’ comes in as ‘A Cheery Group of Gunners and Highlanders’ are pictured in somewhat jarring images for retrospective viewing, given that some of this footage is likely to have been captured before battle. The song is fitting in this context: it extends the pastoral imagery of lost ‘flowers’ of the previous lament with its references to men called from the hillsides and glens of Britain from which they are now missing, while simultaneously recognizing the need for cheer (‘cheer’ being an emotion expressed in spite of something), a sentiment underscored by the way, as Smither notes, ‘two highlanders perform a burlesque “en garde” move as the camera pans past’ (Roger Smither (ed.), The Battles of the Somme and Ancre (Department of Film, Imperial War Museum and DD Video, 1993), p. 33. See Toby Haggith, ‘Reconstructing the Musical Arrangement for The Battle of the Somme (1916)’, Film History, 14 (2002), 12. Haggith cites J. Morton Hutcheson, ‘Music in the Cinema’, The Bioscope, 17 August 1917; for descriptions of the sequence see Smither, The Battles of the Somme and Ancre. 18. Nottingham Guardian, 29 January 1916. 19. Vera Brittain, diary entry for Saturday, 18 September 1915 in Bishop, Chronicle of Youth, pp. 273–4. 20. Vera Brittain, diary entry for Tuesday, 5 October 1915, ibid., p. 285. 21. ‘Ladies Prefer — ?’, Picture Show, 2 June 1928, 1 and 15. 22. Edith Nepean, ‘A Stoll Triumph’ (‘Round the British Studios’), Picture Show, 26 November 1927, 21. The ‘accidental’ overturning also echoes the publicity for Ben Hur, in which Masala’s chariot was indeed involved in an unplanned pile-up that was preserved in the final film. Stoll’s publicity department may well have observed the value in such accounts.


133

23. Hill had been involved in film work since the age of 16. At 17 he was appointed English adviser to Italia Films in Turin. In the war, Hill first served in the Middlesex Regiment and then in the Royal Flying Corps, where he progressed to the rank of major and received an OBE. Finding Italian production all but collapsed when he returned there after the war, back in England he played small roles and joined Stoll in October 1919, working as a scenario writer and taking charge of Stoll’s Literary Department before directing. Another note of performative authenticity was afforded by the much-publicized presence of David Laidlaw, the almost mythical ‘Piper of Loos’. Laidlaw had won the VC and the Croix de Guerre for playing his regiment ‘over the top’ at one of the bleakest moments, gaining him an almost mythical place in all accounts of the battle. 24. See John Hayes, ‘Widescreen Movies’, http://widescreenmovies.org/ WSM01/history.htm [accessed 2 November 2010]; Charlotte Mandel, ‘H.D.’s “Projector II” and Chang, a Film of the Jungle’, http://www.imagists. org/hd/hdcm12.html [accessed 2 November 2010]. 25. ‘Frat’, ‘The Guns of Loos’ (review), Variety, 7 March 1928, 28. 26. Lionel Collier, ‘Reviews of the Week’, Kinematograph Weekly, 16 February 1928, 51. 27. ‘The Guns of Loos’ (review), The Bioscope, 16 January 1928, 55. 28. Whale’s film has been linked to the imagery of the war, and indeed he directed the stage version of Journey’s End in London during the same year as Loos, the 1930 film version of which may be seen as a precursor to Frankenstein, particularly through Colin Clive’s performance. 29. ‘Home Fires’ was, incidentally, adopted by the Unionist Party in the General Election of 1923, as it campaigned for the preservation of British wages against cheaper overseas labour. See Sandy Wilson, Ivor (London: Michael Joseph, 1975), p. 27. 30. See Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).


Part III Notes from the Archive


10 Hello to All This: Music, Memory and Revisiting the Great War Neil Brand

As a long-term collaborator and musical accompanist with the British Silent Cinema Festival, I found myself sitting in the viewing theatres at the British Film Institute watching silent fiction feature material related to the Great War.1 I had been very keen for the event to ‘do’ the war, particularly after a series of important anniversaries, and I had high hopes that we would discover riches, particularly in the features. My spirits fell when faced with the realities unspooling at the BFI. With the exception of Walter Summers’ The Battle of Coronel and the Falklands (1927) – which displayed superb control of the personal and strategic elements of the great sea battle with an assurance that pointed the way for the naval features of the 1940s and 1950s – I could not begin to see the immediacy, the artistry or even the sense of magnitude of the event that I had expected of British filmmakers working only ten years outside the war’s shadow. Where were our expressionist nightmares, our personal experiences? Where was our Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari (Robert Weine, 1919), our All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930)? I seemed to be watching an endless parade of upper-middle-class romances threatened by military inconveniences across the channel. Not, I hasten to add, from the eccentric The Lads from the Village (Harry Loraine, 1919), which seemed a curious harbinger of the Carry On series, showing our brave boys giving it to the Hun in the Sultan’s harem, but elsewhere our national cinema seemed mired in pre-war romance and decidedly dodgy battlefront sequences that smelt of the studio rather than personal experience. The Guns of Loos (Sinclair Hill, 1928) utilized the classic 137


British ploy of finding one event to praise within a series of monumental disasters (Alan Clark’s The Donkeys gives a chilling account of the national catastrophe that Loos actually was) and had wonderfully shot battle sequences, but again the protagonists were not fighting the war as we knew it but for the favours of the daughter of the manor.2 Time and again, it seemed, British silent cinema demonstrated its inability to grapple with a great subject in a timeless and credible way. It took the full five days of playing and watching these films at the festival itself to convince me I was wrong. The films had not missed the point; I had. My mother’s father was killed in Picardy in September 1917, after a year on the Western Front. One of the thousands of ‘missing’, his memorials consist of a name carved on the Thiepval Monument on the Somme, the memorial outside St Mary’s church in Barcombe, Sussex, and a wife and two children, the village’s official ‘war orphans’. My grandmother was so scarred by the loss of her husband and the hardship of feeding three mouths on a widow’s pension that she put my mother through what would now be termed ‘emotional abuse’. My mother recalls the Remembrance Day services at Barcombe, hating them because she would be expected to be ‘on show’. She never knew her father. He was someone else’s memory and a name on a stone, mourned by the nation but entirely unknown to his little girl. The Imperial War Museum’s actuality material on memorials, discussed by Toby Haggith in this volume, is for me hugely significant. I cannot watch the faces fleeting by in the Roll of Honour films, the battlefield burials and the unveilings without carrying in my mind a lifetime’s images of my grandfather and his family; but now those images were being subtly changed. Like every student of the Great War I was a child of Owen and Sassoon, potent channels through which to filter my mother’s reminiscences and my own researches. The received wisdom, in short: the First World War was waste and tortured humanity, those at home were dupes. In the 1970s Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory pointed out for all time that the war poets had the truth because their writing was the finest of the period, therefore their personal experience would come to dominate any attempt to reassess the experience of the common soldier.3 Richard Holmes’s book Tommy attempted to wrest the experience away from them and back into the realm of the personal memoir.4 These actualities seem to prove Holmes right.

Hello to All This 139

Somehow the silent parade of stiff-looking soldiers in photographers’ galleries spoke of something other than waste and sacrifice. Anticipating the screening of the first Roll of Honour film, discussed in the first chapter of this collection, I found myself racking my brains to find less obvious music to accompany it. ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’ turned out to be right, not just ironic. It was merely the first of a series of bifocal insights offered by these films. The viewing of archive material, fiction and actuality, is always an exercise in bifocal vision. Our reception of material is influenced by our own attitudes and prejudices. This is one of the great problems for those of us working with features made to appeal to an audience of a century ago: how far can they be judged on their appeal to modern audiences? Is timelessness the overriding factor in judging the merits of a narrative, or should the viewer detach themselves as far as possible from all they have known and experienced and try to inhabit the space of the film? Playing to the films for the festival seemed to provide something of an answer. The war as represented in this material was immediate, timeless and moving. This was not because it represented a nation undergoing a Sassoonian conversion to the scale of this global catastrophe, it was because the material was itself a vivid record of the very confusion, insecurity and insularity of those we witnessed fighting the war, particularly on the home front. When it came to the cinema’s brief of enlightened entertainment, we were watching despatches from an unknown front, the one-eyed leading the blind. I had never before seen so directly the initial mobilization of the populace with a sense of duty to Belgium and their moral superiority over the Germans (which the story of Edith Cavell served vividly to support). German spies blowing up the houses of parliament (as shown in Bert Haldane’s film German Spy Peril, 1914) is a laughable idea to us now until one remembers Buchan’s The 39 Steps, Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands and other broadly populist ‘wake-up calls’, beautifully termed by Alan Bennett in Forty Years On ‘that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth century literature’.5 The cinema of the 1910s was there, primarily, to entertain rather than to instruct: its target was a predominantly lower-class audience who had to feel part of this war. The vast horrors known to the war poets were not the stuff of the cinema simply for patriotic or taste reasons – the war as a process was


unknown to filmmakers because there had never before been a war like it, let alone one that engaged the home populace to such a great extent. The filmmakers had the unenviable task of talking to the home audience about something they didn’t understand themselves; all they could understand were some of its immediate effects. The process of disillusionment and struggle to deal with vast loss that gradually replaced blind patriotism simply could not be properly represented in British cinema until Britain had come to understand it itself. Its ultimate flowering came with the publication of the war poets in the 1920s. In 1929–30 we have All Quiet on the Western Front, Journey’s End (James Whale, 1930), Suspense (Walter Summers, 1930), The Dawn Patrol (Howard Hawks, 1930), the publication of Wilfred Owen’s complete war poetry and Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That. These are works rooted in an existential no-man’s-land of pain and individualism, ushering in not only a new approach to war but a more truthful examination of the human condition – the fertile soil I had sought in vain in those screenings at the BFI. But in the years between 1914 and 1929 we can trace seismic tremors in advance of that literary and cinematic upheaval, even in the seemingly simplistic features of the 1920s. Where earlier films personalized the war with attacks on the Kaiser, on German spies with evil intent for democracy or on the men who shot Edith Cavell, The Man Who Came Back (1915), as Hammond points out in this volume, both underlined and subverted the idea of heroism with a man’s stoic acceptance of his peculiarly unrewarded feat of arms on the Western Front; this at a time when national losses were creeping out of control and all sacrifice was considered, of necessity, rewarded. The unrewarded sacrifice is at the heart of Great War poetry. Rather than the maimed and blasphemed individuals represented in the bulk of that poetry, the cinema must needs address the nation as a whole, so naturally it was the class order that was shown again and again to be a casualty of the war, albeit one whose passing would ultimately be of benefit. So as one begins to judge the war-related features of the silent British cinema in terms of what they had rather than what they did not, one sees the class-blurring posturing of The General Post (1920) – a film that makes much of the idea that the lord of the manor, acting as a yeomanry private, has to salute his chauffeur, now a much-decorated regular officer, and one of the films I had dismissed at as another toff love story using the war as wallpaper – for


Robin Villiers (Godfrey Winn) shakes hands with David Marshall (Jameson Thomas) in Blighty (Adrian Brunel, 1927).

the attempt to think the unthinkable that it actually is. The grieving upper-class couple of Blighty (Adrian Brunel, 1927) would, in shedding their class prejudices, discover twice the love of their French daughter-in-law and grandson than that lost to them in losing their son. The war-torn lovers of The Guns of Loos are indeed the romantic triangle beloved of middle-class Edwardian fiction taking the first faltering steps into a world in which cowardice, violence and mutilation are now the only tests of manliness. As my binary vision improved watching and playing to these films, I even came to realize that we did have our own Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926) – on a British budget – in the superbly imaginative animation Ever Been Had (1917), which repelled vividly realized behemoths of industrialized warfare with an almost Churchillian scorn for the possibilities of defeat. Here, then, was the home front, delineated for us in detail – the home front that so many thousands of men on leave from the war found alien and deluded, making them long to return to the trenches


where their ‘reality’ now resided. This home front was made up of cinema audiences who were in a war they could not personally fight, against an enemy they did not understand, in circumstances they could not possibly experience, in the hope of a victory they could not see. This was a nation believing itself proactive, but in fact defenceless against an event of such magnitude that it was changing the national consciousness by a hair’s breadth from one day to the next. When the war stopped, the changes continued, in all areas of national life, for a decade – for unlike Germany, whose cinema could speak eloquently from the grave of its losses, horrors and nightmares through the medium of Expressionism, Britain was in the confusing role of war winners whose losses were too great to comprehend. That comprehension took the whole of the 1920s to arrive at its full impact. For me, the two strongest insights were brought about by watching a live performance of The Battle of the Somme (1916), that groundbreaking actuality whose very existence was brought about by the home front’s rejection of propagandist newspaper coverage of the war. I was privileged to be outside the musical ruck on the occasion of the performance of the original score at St Peter’s Church in Nottingham, and could see instead both the effect of the music on the film and the beautiful inner workings of the ensemble. Stephen Horne led from the front with the piano, expertly judging the required musical cues against both the speed of the images and his carefully improvised bridging sections to get from one cue to the next and bring in Gunter Buchwald (violin) and Philip Carli (organ). I had never before been able to see how a silent movie ensemble could seamlessly score a film from disparate pieces of music driven by the speed of the on-screen cues; now, at last, I was able to hear that happen. The viewer’s immersion in the images meant that the single ‘lead’ instrument’s preparation for each cue was almost imperceptible, giving the music the ebb and flow of waves on a beach. It was beautiful, simple and explained things to me about the music of the silent period that I had never before understood; and it left me all the more convinced of the truly heroic standard of its musicians. But above all, the effect of the music on the images was electrifying. Here, in direct, emotional terms, was the dilemma of the war at the time it was fought writ large for all to see and hear. The images were pure Owen and Sassoon, the smiles and helmet wavings of ignorance, the stares of terrible knowledge, the mud, the metal, the vast


spaces blotted with smoke and the tight, damp places where people had to exist – and in the music was a heartbreaking attempt to place meaning on this chaos. Where I, left to my own devices, would have played ‘the pity of war’, the contemporary score (saved from obscurity with scholarly precision by Toby Haggith6) played the hope (and sometimes the conviction) that it was all worthwhile, Wilfred Owen’s ‘lie carved deep in the stone’. But this ‘lie’ was a truth that simply could not see far enough: it was the truth of the simple respect for early losses in the Roll of Honour films, the truth of one British nurse as against thousands of Belgian civilians, the truth of an earl becoming a yeomanry private and a Mademoiselle from Armentieres buried alive with her British sweetheart. These films represented the ‘lie’ of incomplete knowledge. That was what made them so moving. They were the last glimpses of the land of lost content. Journey’s End was another tale of middle-class romance threatened by inconvenience across the channel, only we saw this one from the inconvenient side. No Raleigh’s sister, no Stanhope’s grieving mother, no buffoon father or country house, just the New Forest described in the closing minutes of a good man’s life, and death rolling forward, unstoppable. By 1929, the ground was not just prepared for such truth, it was the logical next step. My final insight from watching and playing to these films was the most personal, and in a way the most disturbing. Images brought me back again and again to the memorials, the battlefield burials, the town ceremonies. These were the equivalent of the score to The Battle of the Somme: a heartbreaking plea for meaning in the face of so much loss. In 1927 the Menin Gate memorial to the missing was unveiled in the town of Ypres. It was the culmination of years of planning within the government and the War Graves Commission as to how to relay the sacrifice of 1914–18 properly to future generations. To Sassoon, who saw it within weeks of its completion, it was an abomination: Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp; Paid with a pile of peace-complacent stone…7 What Sassoon could not bear was the minuteness of the names on the new white wall, the numbering of individuals. He was reacting to the democratization of the fallen. With a jolt, I realized that here


was the cruellest loss to befall my mother and grandmother, for the weight of national mourning raised every fallen soldier of the Great War to the status of the Unknown Soldier: a place of honour in Westminster Abbey, a Cenotaph turning Whitehall into a graveside, a memorial in every village, a roll of honour in every church. But in return, the grieving relatives had to give him up as a man: no Loving Fathers or Brothers, no Deeply Beloved Sons or Here Lies… The decision, taken at ministerial level, not to repatriate any of the fallen in France and Flanders resulted in an endless, memorialized parade of soldiers with rank and number, grieved by all but forever depersonalized as individuals. My grandfather was a 32-year-old carpenter who built the best staircases in Barcombe. Only for 18 months was he Private F. Edwards, 48051, Northumberland Fusiliers. Now, he is that for good, carved deep into the stone. No wonder my mother hated Remembrance Day. The bucolic painted backdrops and faded laurel wreaths of the photographers’ galleries in the Roll of Honour films were more prescient than their creators could possibly know.

Notes 1. The British Silent Festival event ‘Goodbye to All That’ was held in Nottingham in 2004. 2. Alan Clark, The Donkeys (London: Pimlico, 1991). 3. Paul Fussell, The Great War in Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 4. Richard Holmes, Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front (London: Harper Perennial, 2005). 5. Alan Bennett, Forty Years On, Act 2 (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1996). 6. See Toby Haggith, ‘Reconstructing the Musical Arrangement for The Battle of the Somme (1916)’, Film History, 14:1 (2002), 11–24. 7. Siegfried Sassoon ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’, http://wondering minstrels.blogspot.com/2005/03/on-passing-new-menin-gate-siegfried. html [accessed 1 May 2011].

11 The Dead, Battlefield Burials and the Unveiling of War Memorials in Films of the Great War Era Toby Haggith

During the First World War nearly three-quarters of a million British subjects were killed. The grief of the families of those who died overseas was exacerbated by the lack of information about the manner of a serviceman’s death and general ignorance about the nature of life on the battlefield. The families also experienced a sense of dislocation from the body of their loved ones as the War Office ruled against the repatriation of the dead and civilian mourners were not allowed to visit the battle zones. Civilians maintained links with the men who were fighting and commemorated those who had died by compiling ‘rolls of honour’ and displaying them outside churches and other prominent places. In working-class districts the rolls often took the form of a street shrine, where the list of names would be framed and decorated with flowers and Christian and patriotic symbols. At the end of the war, the Imperial War Graves Commission took the decision to maintain the ban on the repatriation of the dead and instead created a number of official cemeteries around the First World War battlefields.1 In the absence of a body and a local grave for mourners to visit, war memorials became the focus for grieving relatives and friends; some 70,000 were erected around Britain. Mostly these were built as a result of local initiative and financed solely by public subscription, in one of the most powerful and lasting expressions of the nation’s grief and, also, of gratitude to its armed forces. In addition to these rituals that grew up to replace traditional methods of burial and mourning, photography, and especially film, offered a means to ease the pain and sense of dislocation experienced by those at home by realistically conveying the circumstances in 145


which men fought, died and were buried. Although it was not until the autumn of 1915 that military authorities gave cameramen access to the battle zones and initially the images released to the public were anodyne, thereafter the new medium was exploited in an intelligent and occasionally candid fashion for propaganda purposes. For example, recognition of the anxiety caused by the policy for the war dead led, in the autumn of 1916, to the establishment of a scheme whereby photographs of war graves could be supplied for free to the bereaved.2 And although sensitivities around this subject meant that it was not until the third series of official films were released in March 1916 that battlefield graves were shown, Liveliness on the British Front (1916) did include a brief 10-second long shot that showed the depressing spectacle of wooden crosses marking graves dug right alongside the trench system.3 The Battle of the Somme, released five months later, not only included a scene of British soldiers burying stiffened corpses close to the front line but, uniquely, views of British dead and a scene in which men appeared to be killed in combat. Despite the fact that these scenes were widely acknowledged actually to help the bereaved by conveying some reality of death in battle, the controversy they provoked meant that official propagandists returned to a policy of blanket censorship. For the rest of the war British corpses and battlefield burials were not shown, except for the occasional military funeral such as that for the victims of the bombing of the Etaples military hospital or of the Canadians killed at Vimy Ridge, which were ceremonial, dignified and reproduced practices common to civilian funerals.4 In Britain, the cinema industry celebrated local military participation and honoured those who had died by producing Roll of Honour films (see Hammond in Hammond & Williams pp. 5–6 this volume) and by recording the ceremonies of dedication and unveiling of rolls of honour, street shrines and war memorials. These ceremonies appeared in issues of the national newsreels, but were also covered by local film companies and enterprising cinema operators, who saw an opportunity to attract a big audience by screening a film in which many of the locals would ‘star’. As well as the likely popularity of such an event, those promoting the screening of a ‘war memorial film’ employed the kind of tactics that had been used during the war for official ‘battle’ films, by suggesting that it was the people’s patriotic duty to attend.5 Concentrating on the inter-war era, this chapter provides a commentary on the eight films of war memorial unveilings held in the

The Dead, Battlefield Burials and War Memorials

147

collection of the Imperial War Museum.6 I will argue that while in general these films supported those forces in society that sought to direct remembrance of the war dead towards nationalistic and militaristic interpretations, they also register countervailing forces within the community that identified the dead in the context of their families and were critical of aspects of the war memorial movement. The first locally made film or ‘Topical’ in this survey has much in common with the wartime scene, as it features the unveiling of a street shrine rather than a monument. However, The Earl of Stamford Unveils the Chapel Street Roll of Honour 5 April 1919 reflects the mood and circumstances of the immediate post-war period as it combines an unveiling ceremony with a procession of returned servicemen. The film was produced by Mr J. Place, the manager of the Picture Theatre in Altrincham, a town eight miles south west of Manchester.7 Chapel Street comprised 60 terraced houses mainly inhabited by Irish working-class families, who paid for and erected the roll of honour to ‘commemorate’ the ‘loyalty and sacrifice’ of the 161 local men who had ‘joined the colours’ and to ensure that the memory of the thirty who had not returned would be treasured, even if their bodies lay ‘in the lonely cemeteries of France and Belgium’.8 The shrine itself was just a simple list, encased in a wooden box fixed to a wall in the street. Unlike the sombre mood of later war memorial unveilings, the Chapel street ceremony and the hour-long procession before it was as much a celebration and expression of gratitude for the men who had returned as a memorial to those who had died. For this reason, it might be more accurate to refer to this as a roll of service rather than a roll of honour, which is the way it was described by Lord Stamford during his speech at the unveiling.9 Shot at various points along the route of the procession and finally from a window overlooking the unveiling ceremony, the film conveys the popular nature of the event, with the route of the procession crowded and onlookers jammed into the narrow street to watch the unveiling. The band members, ex-servicemen and uniformed men in the procession are smiling and joking, bunting hangs across Chapel Street, the spectators clap and wave their hats, and at the unveiling people can be seen looking up from the jostling crowd to grin at the camera, while the local press remarked on the ‘merry and picturesque air of colour’ lent by the two Colleens (young Irish women) who ‘danced to the music of the band’.10 This was also a deeply patriotic


event, with much made of the fact that the people from Chapel Street were mainly Irish and that most of the men had enlisted before conscription was introduced. The press also reported that one member of the crowd responded to the Earl of Stamford’s expression of admiration at the number of men from the small street who had fought for their country, by shouting out: ‘We can do it again’.11 In the context of the aftermath of the Easter Uprising, such expressions of loyalty among the Irish community in Britain would have had great significance. The jubilant nature of this event had much in common with the scenes recorded by the Topical taken in Market Harborough in August 1919, of the Public Welcome to Service Men.12

War memorial unveilings Today the Chapel Street roll of honour is in Altrincham Town Hall, where it was located after the street’s demolition in 1939. As this example reveals, street shrines were not considered permanent memorials, and were often superseded by grander monuments that represented the dead from whole towns or villages. It is to the films recording the unveiling of this category of war memorial that we now turn. The films held in the Museum are all one-reelers and range from one to nine minutes in duration. The earliest is of the unveiling of the Cenotaph in London on Armistice Day 1920 and the last covers Lord Derby’s unveiling of a memorial plinth in Warrington in October 1938. Apart from the film recording the ceremony for the Cenotaph, which also included the transport from France and burial at Westminster Abbey of the Unknown Warrior, the format of the films covering unveiling ceremonies followed a similar structure: the procession to the war memorial, the unveiling and dedication service of the memorial, the laying of wreaths and then occasionally some shots of the aftermath of the ceremony. These were highly ritualized and hierarchical events: serving men of the military would lead the procession to the memorial, typically followed by ex-servicemen and uniformed local organizations such as the fire brigade and quasimilitary youth groups like the Boy Scouts and cadets; general members of the public walked behind the procession. Aping the military funeral, these groups would ‘form up’ at their headquarters and then march in order to the memorial. The ceremonies were also carefully planned. For example, the programme for the ceremonies at Abertillery and


149

Market Harborough were published a week before the day of the unveiling, and the Abertillery programme even included a plan of where everyone was to stand. There were also instructions to discourage private and spontaneous acts of mourning that might mar the overall effect; for example, those planning to attend the unveiling of the memorial cross at Market Harborough were asked that ‘cut flowers or bundles be deposited only in the receptacles provided’.13 The ceremonies in these films also show a high degree of appropriation by the military. At all of the recorded local ceremonies except the one held in Ystalyfera, a high-ranking officer performed the act of unveiling, with a member of the clergy then dedicating the memorial. Sometimes grieving mothers or relatives were given the honour of unveiling the memorial, but in general their position was passive and secondary to the proceedings, as if they were a personalized anomaly within the militaristic and nationalistic function of the unveiling. This is in contrast to the ceremonies at Chapel Street, where families were integrated into the celebrations, with babies held up for the camera and women linking arms with their menfolk in the procession. As well as leading the procession and unveiling the memorial, soldiers often took up a position of guarding or ‘bearing’ the memorial. At Ystalyfera, four soldiers posted a guard at the corners of the memorial column; and at Rawmarsh and Parkgate, a line of soldiers stood in front of the steps leading to the memorial. As well as echoing the functions they would have performed for their comrades at a battlefield burial, the soldiers can be seen to be shielding the ‘dead’ from the civilians. Other rituals, such as the sounding of a last post and reveille at Market Harborough and Ystalyfera, replicated the form of a military funeral. Although no longer in uniform, exservicemen also temporarily reverted to service traditions, for example at Market Harborough, veteran soldiers and sailors formed a guard of honour to be inspected by Major General Hoskins; at Warrington, Lord Derby took the salute as the veterans marched past. The ceremonies also promoted the military ethos among the young, with the incorporation of the Scouts, cadets and even Girl Guide units within the proceedings. In speeches at unveiling ceremonies, establishment figures occasionally referred to the war dead as exemplars of social and political behaviour. For example, during the General Strike, those giving speeches at the war memorial unveiling ceremonies in the mining towns of


The ceremonies promoted the military ethos among the young. Unveiling of the Ystalyfera War Memorial, Saturday December 16th 1922 (Imperial War Museum film number MGH 3720; still image number IWM FLM 3205).

Abertillery and Crumlin urged that the spirit of duty and unity shown by the men who had died in the war should inspire those workers and employers currently so at odds in the valleys of south Wales.14 It is also clear that many who organized and attended the unveiling ceremonies regarded them as proxy funerals. There was a sombre procession of mourners to the site of the memorial – at Market Harborough the military slow marched with rifles reversed – people dressed formally in uniform or in suits and a religious service was conducted at the unveiling. Sometimes the confusion between the two types of ceremony – the dedication of a monument and a funeral – is apparent in press reports. For example, The Cambrian referred to the soldiers who took position at each corner of the war memorial unveiling at Ystalyfera as ‘four military bearers’, as if they had carried a coffin to the memorial.15 This was a cruelly ironic use of words, as the crucial element in a funeral – the corpse – was missing, the climactic and sombre moment of placing the body in the earth


151

replaced by the theatrical and exultant unveiling of the memorial. This ritual in itself was frequently made slightly farcical when, as at the ceremonies at Ystalyfera and Rawmarsh and Parkgate, the flag became caught around the monument.

Nature of the films I now turn from a description of the ceremonies recorded to an exploration of the kind of coverage provided by the films. The fact that the unveiling ceremonies were filmed underlines the importance of these events in the life of the local community. In the title sequence for the film of the Ystalyfera ceremony, it is noted that ‘This is the First Topical Picture to be Taken in Ystalyfera’. Indeed, the war memorial film is frequently the only Topical from a local area to have survived; they were preserved as important historical documents. But by watching the films we can see how significant the ceremonies were, the large numbers who attended, people climbing into trees and onto roofs to get a closer look, and the broad representation from all classes and organizations within the town. The films also reveal that collective commemorations of the First World War remained important late into the 1930s, with the ceremony in Warrington in October 1938 attracting large crowds. Because the primary aim of the Topical was to attract a local audience, the cameramen spent as much time recording the faces of the spectators and those in the procession as capturing the ceremony itself. To ensure that they recorded the faces of as many participants as possible, Topical cameramen filmed at the apex of corners and from elevated viewpoints along the route of the procession. At Ystalyfera, the cameraman filmed the procession to the memorial in one long take, recording right to the last stragglers. Once at the memorial, the cameramen repeatedly panned back and forth across the crowd of spectators. Those recording the ceremony of the Rawmarsh and Parkgate memorial used two cameras, which ensured that, for example, the wreath layers were filmed as they mounted the steps to the memorial and that their faces were also seen as they laid the wreaths down. In this respect, the local unveiling films differ from newsreels recording national commemorations in London at the end of the war, such as the Victory Parade and the Homecoming of the Unknown Warrior, which were concerned with the overall spectacle and symbolism of the event and the VIPs in attendance, elements that could


be recognized by all, thus there were only brief or distant views of those taking part in the procession and scant attention to the spectators lining the route. As well as a method of drawing an audience to the local cinema, filming a memorial unveiling can be seen as part of the ongoing strategy by cinema proprietors to gain respectability and a broader class base among the audience by associating with the patriotic endeavour of the war. Although cinema going was by far the most popular form of public entertainment in Britain, attracting weekly audiences of 21 million in 1917, profits had been affected by declining admissions as a result of the entertainment tax on ticket prices, which was introduced in May 1916.16 It had long been realized within the cinema industry that greater profits could be attained if owners could break their reliance on working-class audiences who were attracted by cheap seats. However, in order to attract the wealthier patrons who would enable the setting of higher admission prices, the cinema industry had to change its negative image as a brash and plebeian form of entertainment. During the war, many managers and owners had endeavoured to increase the respectability and public profile of their cinemas by arranging special screenings of official war films such as The Battle of the Somme, to which local politicians, military leaders and titled figures were invited. It was also common for proprietors to make well-publicized patriotic gestures, such as offering free admission to invalided soldiers and nurses or donating the house takings of a screening of The Battle of the Somme to a war charity. Thus after the war we can see the continuation of this strategy, with local cinema managers arranging the filming of unveiling ceremonies and even sitting on the committees convened to oversee the design and erection of war memorials.17 Therefore Mr Place must have been delighted by the outcome of filming the Chapel Street ceremony, as both the Earl of Stamford and his mother, the Countess, came to a screening of the film at the Altrincham Picture Theatre. So grateful was Mr Place to secure their patronage and aristocratic approval that he was even moved to donate a copy of the film to the earl.18 Consistent with this strategy of gaining respectability and status within the community, the films are invariably deferential to the influential figures connected with the memorial ceremony. For example, the film of the ceremony for the Rawmarsh and Parkgate memorial begins with a scene in which the members of the war memorial


153

committee and the architect are effectively presented to the audience, by means of a slow pan of the head and faces of each person seated at the base of the monument; presumably specially filmed before the ceremony began. It is also noticeable that the name of the VIP honoured with unveiling the memorial features prominently in the title of the films of the ceremonies at Abertillery, Altrincham, Rawmarsh and Parkgate, and Warrington. Although the name of Sir Reginald Hoskins KCB CMG DSO does not appear on the title card for the ceremony at Market Harborough, his full name and all his honours are repeated, with irritating superfluity, on three of the title cards in this nine-minute film. It is a reflection of the nature and purpose of these films that they are devoid of any reference to the controversies that frequently accompanied the project to erect a local war memorial. A common area of contention was whether a memorial should be utilitarian, such as an extension to a cottage hospital, or take the form of a monument. This issue divided the communities of Abertillery and Ystalyfera, with some Abertillerians so opposed to the creation of a monument that in the week before the unveiling there were rumours that a guard had been posted to protect the bronze statue from being damaged or torn down.19 Even when this matter could be settled, there was often further disagreement about the design of the memorial. For example, in Market Harborough 1500 people signed a petition opposing the decision of the architect and the War Memorial Committee to leave the names of the dead off the memorial cross. Nevertheless, the only reference to such a controversy in the films held at the Imperial War Museum occurs in a mysterious and highly coded sequence of stills and titles (see image p. 154) coming at the end of the film covering the ceremony at Rawmarsh and Parkgate: Title: ‘But let us not forget’ Title: ‘Having achieved its object it was reverently buried here…’ A still of the bushes at the base of the memorial site. Title: ‘May it rest in peace with the secret of its makers buried with it’ Title: ‘The End’ Records of the construction of the memorial reveal that a small concrete cross had been erected anonymously in front of the parish


The concrete cross. Unveiling of the Rawmarsh & Parkgate War Memorial by Col. Stephen Rhodes DSO, Sunday 3rd June 1928 (Imperial War Museum film number MGH 3598, still image number IWM FLM 3931).

church two years earlier, in protest at the length of time it had taken for the war memorial to be built. The shot of the bushes adjacent to the memorial referred to the place where the concrete cross had been buried; hence the comment, ‘Having achieved its object it was reverently buried here…’20 Clearly, the concrete cross had been such a public form of protest and had served such an important function in the community that some reference to it had to be made in the film, while its symbolic burial was also meant to signal the ‘burial’ of the arguments once the war memorial had been erected, bearing out Alex King’s observation that there was great pressure within communities to find unanimity around the war memorial project.21

Conclusion Given such a consensual and deferential relationship to the war memorial project, it is hard to escape the conclusion that these films provide an uncomplicated and uncritical record of the war memorial


155

movement, a cinematic souvenir similar to the glossy print of the memorial cross that was distributed free with issues of the Market Harborough Advertiser. This analogy is particularly pertinent in the case of the Market Harborough film, in which the intertitles repeated, word for word, the inscription on the base of the memorial cross.22 Indeed, the evidence of the films examined here suggests that cinema proprietors were so anxious to ingratiate themselves with the local political and military establishment that they produced films that could continue to serve a patriotic function some time after the ceremony had taken place. For instance, the one recording the war memorial unveiling at Warrington was added to another film, shot in the town a year later, covering a National Service Parade and designed to boost recruitment to units of the Civil Defence.23 However, we should not overlook the manner in which the films captured spontaneous happenings at the ceremonies that were not recorded or were overlooked in other accounts of the ceremonies, which tended to undermine the collective and patriotic objectives of the war memorial project. For example, in the film of the Abertillery ceremony, a middle-aged woman with medals pinned to her coat suddenly appears in centre frame, facing the camera, presumably picked out from the crowd by the cameraman. She then appears sitting in front and at the foot of the memorial during the unveiling ceremony. As it transpires, the woman, a Mrs Williams, was only given this position of prominence after having been introduced to Field Marshall Lord Allenby in the moments prior to the ceremony; thus she was honoured as an afterthought. Perhaps Allenby felt guilty when he realized the degree to which grieving relatives were excluded from the formal proceedings? Similarly, it is amusing to note that the mourners at Market Harborough ignored the petty rules about flowers, as the final sequences of the film of the unveiling ceremony show the memorial cross covered with wreaths and floral tributes. Moreover, as we have seen in the case of the Rawmarsh and Parkgate film, despite the pressures within small communities to establish unanimity around the memorial project, the makers of Topicals occasionally found ways to represent the opinions of those sections of the community that had been critical of some aspect of the memorial scheme. On such occasions, Topical producers may have been sympathetic to this viewpoint or, more cynically, wanted to ensure that they did not alienate a sizeable proportion of their potential audience.


We should also consider how the nature of the coverage provided by the Topical cameramen tended to move the focus of the ceremony away from the rather narrow confines of the programmed proceedings, to the private grieving of friends and family. As the camera roves around the crowds of spectators, we notice the pained and contemplative faces of those following the proceedings or singing hymns during the service of dedication. At Rawmarsh and Parkgate, the imperative to film as many locals as possible meant that the moment at the end of the programmed proceedings, when the mostly female mourners swept towards the memorial to lay their flowers, provided for the viewer a powerful final image of the families symbolically reclaiming the memory of their loved ones from the militaristic and nationalistic panoply that had gone before. Similarly, because the cameraman chose to carry on filming at the memorial cross at Market Harborough after the ceremony had ended, a poignant scene was secured in which ordinary locals can be seen admiring the flowers and reading the messages on the floral tributes, in general making their own private connections with the dead. However, the films also record the fact that people’s emotional responses to the unveilings were complex. Along with the griefstricken there were those who grinned and laughed, and the children who found it difficult to know how to respond. This mixture of emotions and meanings conveyed by the films must have been transferred, and even exaggerated, when they were screened in the local cinema. First, many of those attending the screenings would have been there to spot their chums or themselves on the screen. Thus ‘celebrity spotters’ might mix with those hoping for a chance to commune once again with the funereal spirit of the ceremony. Secondly, the potentially serious and solemn mood of the Topical would have been somewhat compromised by the mixed nature of the cinema programmes in which the film was shown. For example, at the County Electric Palace, the film of the ceremony at Market Harborough, which ran from 4–11 October, was included in a programme with The 4 Just Men, ‘a thrilling mystery by Edward Wallace’; a one-reel comedy starring Harold Lloyd called Heap Big Chief; The Home of the Giants; and Around the Town.24 Finally, I would like to reflect on the perspective these films offer to the twenty-first century viewer. It is often noted that actuality or documentary film brings the viewer closer to the historical event that has


157

been recorded. Members of audiences at screenings of Imperial War Museum footage have remarked on how this impression has been particularly pronounced in the case of the war memorial unveiling films. In discussions during these screenings, it has been concluded that this phenomenon can be explained in two ways: the current scholarly and popular interest in the memorialization of the First World War;25 and the camera techniques typical of the genre, which give today’s viewer an intimate and privileged perspective on the event, almost as if they were attending the unveiling themselves. However, as this foregoing analysis suggests, this beguiling impression of the closing of historical distance is largely illusory. While the ‘point-of-view’ framing of the Topical cameramen may allow us to mingle with the crowds in the procession to the memorial, observe the emotions of the spectators and watch the ceremony from positions right in front of the monument, the real meanings and complex histories behind these important events remain far from our grasp. Indeed, as the story of the concrete cross at Market Harborough shows, the films belong to a genre so rooted in the local context that they can be inscrutable to an outsider.

Notes The research leading to this publication was carried out while I was studying at the Research School of Humanities, Australian National University. I would also like to thank Anne Brennan, of the School of Art at the ANU, for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Thanks also go to my colleague Jane Furlong, of the National Inventory of War Memorials, for comments on the final draft. 1. ‘Comradeship in Death’, The Times, 29 November 1918. 2. ‘Soldiers’ Graves’, The Times, 18 September 1916. By June 1920, 163,987 photos had been supplied to relatives, with a further 20,906 being processed. 3. Liveliness on the British Front (27/3/1916), Imperial War Museum catalogue no. (IWM cat. no.) IWM 208; Villages in Flanders, the Scenes of Hard Fighting, Now Held by the British (3/4/1916), IWM cat. no. 209. 4. Hospital Bombed by Germans, And the Funeral of the Victims (1918), IWM cat. no. IWM 232; The Canadian Victory at Courcellette: and the advance of the tanks (1917), IWM cat. no. IWM 466. 5. In The Market Harborough Advertiser (4 October 1921), it was suggested that the screenings of the war memorial film at the Electric Cinema ‘should be seen by every Harborian’. 6. The Earl of Stamford Unveils the Chapel Street Roll of Honour, Altrincham 5 April 1919, IWM cat. no. MGH 2215; Armistice Day 1920, Homecoming of


7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

an Unknown Warrior Pathé Gazette, Issue 1721 (18/11/1921), IWM cat. no. IWM 505; Market Harborough – Unveiling of Memorial Cross, 25 September 1921 and Inspection of the Guard of Honour of Ex-Soldiers and Sailors by Major-General Sir Reginald Hoskins K.C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O. General Officer Commanding North Midlands Area, IWM cat. no. MGH 3302; Unveiling of the Ystalyfera War Memorial, Saturday December 16th 1922, IWM cat. no. MGH 3720; Lord Allenby Unveils Abertillery War Memorial (1 December 1926), IWM cat. no. MGH 4920; Unveiling of the Rawmarsh & Parkgate War Memorial by Col. Stephen Rhodes DSO, Sunday 3rd June 1928, IWM cat. no. MGH 3598; War Graves Memorial, Soissons, 1928, IWM cat. no. MGH 1941; Universal News Issue 82, Lord Derby Unveils 1914–1919 Memorial to South Lancashire Regiment Prince of Wales’s Volunteers at Warrington Parish Church (13/10/1938), IWM cat. no. MGH 4153. The Earl of Stamford Unveils the Chapel Street Roll of Honour was made by the Manchester Film Company, possibly just a name given by Mr Place to the Topicals he produced for his cinema. The film was screened in every programme in the Altrincham Picture Theatre between 8 and 20 April 1919. IWM cat. no. MGH 2215. Altrincham, Bowden and Hale Guardian, 11 April 1919. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Market Harborough (Urban District) Public Welcome to Service Men Sunday, 17 August 1919, IWM cat. no. MGH 3301. Market Harborough Advertiser, 20 September 1921. See the report of Lord Treowen’s speech at the ceremony for the opening of the memorial gates to Crumlin Park, in the South Wales Gazette and Newport News, 19 November 1926; and of the speech by the Rt. Hon. William Brace during the ceremony at the Arbertillery war memorial, in the South Wales Gazette and Newport News, 3 December 1926. The Cambrian, 22 December 1922. Nicholas Hiley, ‘The British Cinema Auditorium’, in Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp (eds.), Film and the First World War (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995), p. 162. The local cinema proprietor was one of the members of the joint committee to oversee the erection of a war memorial in honour of the dead of the Wirral seaside resorts of Hoylake and West Kirby. Other committee members included the local MP, representatives of the local railway company, trade unionists, doctors, clergymen and ex-servicemen. See Alex King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembering (Oxford, 1998), p. 29. Altrincham, Bowden and Hale Guardian, 15 April 1919. South Wales Gazette, 3 December 1926. The film of the unveiling ceremony of the War Memorial at Abertillery was shown in the Metropole Cinema on 3, 4 and 6–10 December 1926. I am grateful to my colleague Jennifer Flippance at the National Inventory for War Memorials for solving this mystery for me.


159

21. King, Memorials of the Great War, p. 211. 22. ‘To the glory of God in grateful remembrance of all in the parish of Market Harborough, Great and Little Bowden, who served in the war, 1914–1918. This cross is erected as an enduring memorial to the fallen. Their name liveth’. 23. National Service on Parade, Warrington, May 20th 1939, IWM cat. no. MGH 4159. 24. Market Harborough Advertiser, 4 October 1921, 5. 25. Itself inspired and nourished by the UK’s National Inventory of War Memorials, established in 1988 to record in detail every war memorial in the country. In November 2005 the database went online, giving users the ability to search for details of the memorials and the names inscribed on them. As well as stimulating the activity of local amateur historians, who compiled the bulk of information in the inventory, wider interest in the subject was fostered by related television programmes, notably Not Forgotten, a four-part documentary series broadcast on Channel 4 in November and December 2005, in which Ian Hislop explored the impact of the First World War on British society by investigating the stories of people commemorated on various local war memorials.

12 Anticipating the Blitz Spirit in First World War Propaganda Film: Evidence in the Imperial War Museum Archive Roger Smither

In any extended propaganda campaign, and especially in the propaganda of a nation engaged in a major war, the fearful and hate-inducing figure of the enemy who is being fought against needs to be balanced by a more positive representation of what is being fought for. Where British propaganda of the twentieth century is concerned, however, a widespread perception has been that such balance has been achieved across the two wars, rather than within either of them. Thus, the dominant motif of First World War propaganda is often recalled in terms of a simple appeal to patriotism, motivated largely by a concentration on the vileness of the enemy. In the words of Professor Philip Taylor: Images of the bloated ‘Prussian Ogre’, proudly sporting his pickelhaube, the ‘Beastly Hun’ with his sabre-belt barely surrounding his enormous girth, busily crucifying soldiers, violating women, mutilating babies, desecrating and looting churches, are deeply implanted in the twentieth century’s gallery of popular images. Evoked repeatedly by Allied propagandists during the Great War, the British stereotype of the Hun and the French image of the ‘Boche’ provided them with the essential focus they needed to launch their moral offensive against the enemy, at home and abroad.1 ‘Atrocity’ propaganda was widely disparaged after the war, and with it the idea of appeals to the more simplistic forms of nationalism. As the next war drew closer a very different approach was advocated. 160

Anticipating the Blitz Spirit in Propaganda Film

161

In his Propaganda contribution to the ‘In the Next War’ series of books edited by Basil Liddell Hart, Sidney Rogerson, a First World War infantry officer turned public relations consultant, wrote: The corner stone, without which the arch of propaganda for the next war will be no more than a pile of bricks, is a broad positive propaganda preaching the gospel that the voluntary system can only survive as a result of the voluntary service of the community; a propaganda to stir the public conscience to a sense of duty to the democratic state to which it is so inestimable a privilege to belong. In other words, the inhabitants of our democracy must be induced freely to make the efforts that those of the totalitarian States are induced to by propaganda and compulsion. Propaganda is the common factor, but it must be a propaganda linked to a constructive ideal: a propaganda of Love of one’s own country and not Fear of another.2 It is generally accepted that British propaganda in the Second World War conformed to Rogerson’s prescription. The filmmakers of the British documentary movement, who would go on to produce the outstanding films of the Second World War, held in contempt the people initially in charge at the Ministry of Information, characterized by one of the former as ‘old fashioned people, who would still have liked us to fight the war in terms of society ladies dressed as Britannia’. The same speaker also said: ‘The attack was to get the Ministry of Information to base its policies on realism rather than 1914 romance’; and later: ‘The battle between the old and the new was won, of course, decisively’.3 Whether or not the results conformed to the strictest definition of ‘realism’, the material generated by the UK’s Ministry of Information, and its less directly controlled allies in the press, the BBC and other media, promoted an image of Britain and Britishness, or perhaps more specifically of England and Englishness, that was held to be automatically and atavistically opposed to the very idea of Fascism or Nazism. Although the documentary filmmakers perceived themselves as radical outsiders fighting a conservative establishment, the depiction of Britishness in Second World War propaganda was actually an effort in which forces from differing cultural or political backgrounds frequently combined. Angus Calder has pointed out that it brought together the


opposing tendencies of the conservative ‘Georgians’ and the more leftleaning ‘Auden generation’ in the promotion of a concept that he has dubbed ‘Deep England’, observing: That their visions of 1940 overlapped suggests that the power of wartime experience to draw together people who would previously have had nothing polite to say to each other has not been exaggerated.4 Britishness could accommodate both nostalgic recollection of a golden past and the ambition to produce a better, fairer future. The resulting picture of ‘Britishness’ combined several elements. Thanks to the skills of the filmmakers of the Second World War, many of these elements have been burned so deeply into the collective consciousness that the image has outlasted the war itself. When a modern politician invokes the ‘Spirit of the Blitz’ or of Dunkirk, or recalls the ‘People’s War’, he or she effortlessly taps into a wealth of images including not only bomb craters, the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral among the smoke and the ‘little ships’ of the evacuation but much else besides, which somehow includes many aspects of urban and rural life that were only peripherally affected by the fighting. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the perception that this tendency in Second World War film propaganda really was an entirely new departure, in a radically different direction from the one taken a generation earlier. Was it possible that the propagandists, and particularly the film propagandists, of the First World War had in fact foreshadowed their successors? Did any of the images of ‘the People’s War’ have their equivalents a quarter of a century earlier? The films held by the Imperial War Museum’s Film and Video Archive seem to support such an argument. In setting out a checklist of the ‘People’s War’ symbolism of Britishness, several components may be identified. An essential part of the picture is the country’s armed services; which, of course, in circumstances of mass volunteering and conscription really do represent the ‘nation in arms’. Portrayal of the British fighting forces in both wars follows very much the same iconography: Jack the sailor, thanks to whom Britannia continues to rule the waves; Tommy the soldier, who would never sink to the same depths as the Hunnish enemy, and who may make a few mistakes to begin with but always


163

wins the last battle; and the handsome young warriors of the air service, our latest heroes in their exciting new flying machines. For propaganda purposes, however, the characteristics of the servicemen are only a small part or reflection of the country for which they fight. Turning our attention to the civilian nation, what are the standard characteristics of the People’s War? Because the conflict is a total one, the population is ‘all in it together’ or, to put it another way, ‘everybody is in the Front Line now’. They stand together, united across the bounds of class, race, religion and so on. Their solidarity is personified by a Royal Family and a charismatic Prime Minister, who both demonstrate their determination to share their people’s fate and inspire and symbolize the nation’s will to fight. First World War precedents for these Second World War themes abound in the Imperial War Museum Film Archive. David Lloyd George was a highly visible Prime Minister, whose popularity was evident even before he took office on occasions such as his attendance at the National Eisteddfod in Aberystwyth in August 1916, recorded in Topical Budget 261-1 (held under catalogue number NTB 261-01). The senior members of the Royal Family were regularly filmed visiting munitions factories and hospitals, reviewing troops and presenting medals. A less than brilliantly effective example of this genre is The King’s Tour Around the Napier Motor Works (IWM 418); it is probably kinder to represent it by The King Visits His Armies in the Great Advance (IWM 192). The next royal generation was also on call for many morale-raising photo opportunities, such as the February 1918 Visit of HRH the Prince of Wales to Ebbw Vale (IWM 170) or the March 1918 shipyard visit in The Prince of Wales in Glasgow (IWM 528). Prominent in the new kinds of battle that must be fought on the home front were the members of the civilian services – bobbies you can trust (not like those nasty continental policemen) and heroic firefighters and Civil Defence workers – whose full-time ranks were swollen by volunteer auxiliaries. Some of these themes can be found in a kind of prototype ‘Blitz spirit’ film from 1917 called London: British Fact and German Fiction (held in a Spanish version as IWM 443). The approach used by the film is to quote claims from the German press of successful air attacks on London – and then to disprove them by showing the alleged sites of those attacks undamaged. To verify that the cameraman has really filmed each location after the date of the supposed attack


A still from the film Visit of HRH the Prince of Wales to Ebbw Vale, February 21st 1918 (Imperial War Museum film number IWM 170; still image number IWM FLM 1067).

(rather than simply pulling some old stock footage out of the library), a uniformed special constable of the Metropolitan Police holding a placard bearing the date is included in each shot. Besides showing undamaged landmarks in London, German claims to have bombed munitions factories are contrasted with the actual damage to a number of clearly non-military targets, including working-class houses in Burgoyne Road, Brixton, all gutted by bombs. In another anticipatory echo of 1940–41, the undamaged London landmarks shown by the film include Buckingham Palace, with the king in residence. The number of bombs dropped on Britain, and the amount of damage and casualties inflicted, were of course far smaller in the First World War than in the Second, but the threat of strategic bombing was one of the factors in which the earlier conflict presaged the ‘total war’ nature of the later one. The home front during the Great War was also warned of the threat of invasion; as late as November 1917, a story in issue 325-2 of War Office Topical Budget (NTB 325-02) was


165

introduced by the caption: ‘INVASION IS STILL POSSIBLE. In declaring that the Volunteers were not playing at soldiers, Lord French said the unexpected happened in war and that the next surprise might be invasion…’ The extent to which the entire population could be called on to make sacrifices to keep away from British soil the horrors of invasion, bombardment and occupation that had already been visited on Belgium and France was the theme of For The Empire (IWM 714), made by Gaumont for the Wellington House propaganda office in 1916. The film may have opened with an allegorical tableau of Britannia with martyred Belgium, but it progressed to acted vignettes of families of all social categories facing up to bereavement, and shots of war-damaged cities such as Rheims, Arras and Ypres (contrasted to an untouched London), before developing into an appeal for War Savings to finance the continuing struggle. The response of ‘Britishness’ to total war, however, required more than resilience in the face of aerial attack, vigilance against the risk of invasion, stoicism in facing up to hardship and separation or bereavement, and the purchase of savings bonds. ‘Getting on with it’ or ‘doing their bit’ required more cheerful and active commitment. With food supplies heavily dependent on the vulnerable ocean convoys, selfsufficiency and imagination were promoted. The 1940s Food Flashes had their equivalents in the Film Tags of 1918, many of them made by the Hepworth Manufacturing Company. ‘Digging for Victory’ was advocated, even if not in quite those words, by two 1918 films, Fighting U-Boats in a London Back Garden (IWM 594-10) and The New Version (IWM 594-4). The latter reworked the poem ‘Come into the Garden, Maud’: Maud is here a bored young lady whose husband invites her to join him in the kitchen garden he has created. She complains that he has ruined the lawn, but he explains that otherwise people in Britain would starve. She agrees to help, and finally falls asleep in the hay, tired but fulfilled. Similarly, Second World War appeals for ‘saving not wasting’ were anticipated by films like Father and Lather (1918) (IWM 1122), in which a young housemaid is instructed by the cook about the need to save soap, and returns home to share the news with her father. Another example is The Secret (1918) (IWM 549-1), in which a working-class husband complains to his wife about his meagre dinner, protesting that their neighbour still makes suet puddings and dumplings. Sneaking a look through the neighbour’s window, his wife discovers that the neighbour is in fact using not suet but grated


potato mixed with flour. That evening, the wife presents the husband with a pudding that renders him speechless. Interestingly, or at least entertainingly, one Second World War food trailer consciously evoked the style of First World War film tags such as the two examples just described. The Museum acquired a copy of The Way to His Heart, issued with the British Movietone newsreel for 17 December 1942 (held as NMV 706A). In this elaborate pastiche of silent film, complete with piano accompaniment, intertitles and artificially aged film stock, the father of a family rages out of the house when given cold sausage and pickles yet again, but later returns from the bar to find that his wife and daughter have prepared a delicious meal of potatoes for him. British propaganda in both world wars paid particular attention to the role of women, who had a crucial double part to play in the conflict. On the one hand, they were required, as in The Secret, stoically to keep the home fires burning while the men went off to fight or do important war work. They were, however, also themselves expected to step in to do essential jobs, and – to the more than occasional amusement and surprise of the filmmakers – actually proved capable of doing them rather well. It could in fact be argued that the experience of the First World War had so thoroughly demonstrated the capabilities of the female workforce that the attitude of the Second World War commentators should be considered even more unforgivable than common sense would make it anyway. A number of First World War films showed women at work in specific industries. The protagonist of 1917’s A Day in the Life of a Munitions Worker (IWM 510) is a woman, as are the majority of her workmates, while Plant and Operations in the Manufacture of Gasmasks (IWM 279) also features an overwhelmingly female workforce in this film shot at the Boots premises in Nottingham. Several films highlight the work of the Women’s Land Army, of nurses or of the women’s auxiliary units in the armed services. Another category of films such as Mrs. John Bull Prepared (IWM 521) put together a composite picture of the many different ways in which women were helping the war effort. Beyond the depiction of how the British fight the war, the concept of Britishness in the Second World War also embodied the eternal values of the nation, although it did so in a rather confusing way. The majority of propaganda naturally stressed the need for technological wizardry and industrial might to secure victory, and it was largely its


167

A still from the 1917 film A Day in the Life of a Munition Worker (Imperial War Museum film number IWM 510; still image number IWM FLM 2066).

city dwellers and industrial workers who represented the nation at war (without denying that these people were reliant on the farmers as well as the merchant seamen to keep them fed). At the same time, however, there remained a curiously persistent myth that the essence of Britishness – or perhaps particularly of ‘Englishness’, as the other nations of Britain have their own identities – was to be found in a rolling landscape furnished with small villages of church, pub and thatched cottages, peopled by a relaxed but recognizable rural hierarchy of paternalistic landowners, gentlemanly professionals, goodhearted craftsmen, worthy labourers and their families. The nation is shown to be fighting with the technology, the industry and the attitudes of modern urban Britain, but somehow it is the traditional, peaceful values of bucolic rural England that it is fighting for. The rural idyll exists in pictorial propaganda partly to provide a visual contrast to the images of industrial might and urban modernity, but it is perceived to have great integral value as well; witness the frequency with which it is still invoked by politicians at the start


of the third millennium. It also found its place in the armoury of First World War propaganda. A film called Life at Iwerne Minster in War-Time (1918?) (IWM 285) consists of little more than views of daily life in a small rural community in the Hampshire Downs in the last summer of the First World War. It introduces the audience to a number of personalities and provides details of local life. Some of these confirm the reality of an ongoing war: a noticeboard at the village pump displays pages from recent newspapers, and German prisoners of war, still wearing their uniforms, work on the land with the local farmers, cutting down trees and making hay. The war is not conspicuously present in other scenes, however, several of which uncannily prefigure shots used by Humphrey Jennings a quarter of a century later. Children play round a maypole at the village school; the audience sees various thatched cottages in the village and is shown a range of small-scale farming activities, including butter making, a farm show and an auction, as well as rabbit keeping, bee keeping, hive manufacture and poultry farming. The film’s message is that ‘we must all pull together and everyone must do their best, then happiness and prosperity will come to our homes’. Another bucolic icon in First World War propaganda is that of the plump, beef-eating squire figure of John Bull as a personification of Britain, for example in a number of animated War Savings appeals from Kinsella and Morgan, even when he is depicted next to a factory in Old Father William (1917/18) (IWM 543). It is John Bull again who sits on a pile of gold representing Britain’s war expenditure in Lancelot Speed’s animated realization of the statistical extent of Britain’s Effort (1918) (IWM 514). This is, however, one precedent that is not followed in the films of the Second World War. In these, as my colleague Toby Haggith has pointed out to me, John Bull has effectively vanished as a symbol; in his place, the propagandists are more likely to evoke John Citizen. Exploration of the examples of British home front propaganda from the First World War that are preserved in the Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive thus shows that many of the classic themes of the Second World War’s ‘Blitz spirit’ are indeed already present, especially in the relatively mature period of propaganda filmmaking in the final year of the war. Many of these themes were also present in German home front propaganda of the Second World War. The implication that such tropes need to be considered as universal


169

rather than specifically British is one that needs more examination than space permits here. Leaving others to tackle this wider question, let me just conclude that the image of ‘Britishness’ that we associate with the iconography of the Second World War was in fact extensively foreshadowed in the First. In this as in many other ways, we should never allow people who have not studied the material to dismiss the ‘primitive’ nature of the films made in the first 20 years of cinema history compared to the supposed sophistication of their successors.

Notes Details of all the films mentioned in this article, and of the other 1100 or so titles making up the Imperial War Museum’s archive of First World War film, may be found either in the pages of the published catalogue – Roger Smither (ed.), Imperial War Museum Film Catalogue Volume One: The First World War Archive (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1994) – or through the Imperial War Museum’s ‘Collections Online’ website at www.iwmcollections.org.uk. 1. Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Era (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 180. 2. Sidney Rogerson, Propaganda in the Next War (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1938), pp. 164–5. 3. Sir Arthur Elton, quoted in Elizabeth Sussex, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary: The Story of the Film Movement Founded by John Grierson (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 119–20. 4. Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Pimlico, 1992), p. 181. In the following discussion of ‘Deep England’ symbolism, this chapter also draws heavily on Calder’s earlier book, The People’s War: Britain, 1939–45 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969).

13 ‘How Shall We Look Again’? Revisiting the Archive in British Silent Film and the Great War Bryony Dixon and Laraine Porter

As the First World War now passes from living memory, the film records that survive are increasingly significant in shaping our understanding of the conflict. Feature films produced in the aftermath indicate how the conflict entered the collective memory and was explored and exploited by cinéastes, writers and performers. When we look again at films such as Blighty (1927), The Guns of Loos and Dawn (1928), we need to remind ourselves that these films were produced almost a decade after the end of the conflict and are part of the process of remembering. Wilfred Wilson Gibson’s poem ‘Lament’, published in a 1926 anthology, expressed this moment of troubled reflection of present upon past beautifully: We who are left, how shall we look again Happily on the sun or feel the rain Without remembering how they who went Ungrudgingly and spent Their lives for us loved, too, the sun and rain?1 Most films of the early and mid-1920s were made with the benefit of hindsight and at a respectful distance. But by the late 1920s, respect and mourning were giving way to critique and questioning, indicated, for example, by the publication of poems by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That. Peace movements had begun to spring up and the world, heading for the Great Depression, was a very different place. By 1928, as cinema itself was undergoing its own sound revolution, there was also criticism 170

‘How Shall We Look Again’?

171

Sybil Thorndike as Edith Cavell in Dawn (Herbert Wilcox, 1928).

that filmmakers were exploiting the conflict for commercial reasons and audiences were growing weary of war subjects. The first part of this chapter will offer a selective interpretive framework of the industry and the films produced. The second part will consider their resonances in the twenty-first century and associated archival and presentational issues in revisiting them. Along the way, it will examine why the British industry produced the films it did and what earlier exhibition and presentational practices can tell us about how the films were understood at the time and how we can use this information to contextualize them today. Production can be divided into four rough chronological periods. The first occurs in the early part of the war, 1914–16, before the impact of the government’s own policies on cinema and the war effort were fully realized. The next period is 1916–18, when propaganda films were produced in significant numbers by the War Office and the industry. The third period, 1918–24, is the immediate aftermath of the war, which marks a ‘mourning’ period. The move to memorialize the war and the sacrifice comes to fruition here with the establishment of local memorials, as well as


the Cenotaph in London, and the formalization of Armistice Day. This was the period when the industry was attempting to rebuild itself, producing feature films. The fourth period, 1924–8, sees the emergence of anti-war critique, marked by the publication of the war poets, and consequently critics and filmmakers start interpreting the war from a greater distance. Cutting across this rough periodization, and in spite of the effects of war, British cinema was itself undergoing massive transformation. The earlier links with theatre, variety and music hall were being severed as films became longer, with the need for different performance styles and narrative structures. The demographic shift in audiences, with increasing numbers of women visiting the cinema due to their increasing economic independence, and the consolidation of Hollywood’s dominance, all contributed to cinema’s transformation during this period. The British cinema culture that entered the war in 1914 was very different to the one that emerged in the post-war period and developed throughout the 1920s.

Film production in the Great War Given the relative infancy of cinema at the start of the First World War, it is unsurprising that there are few surviving fiction feature films that addressed the conflict directly. The government became aware of the importance of film in the war effort through the success of German film propaganda in the then neutral US, but was slow to act. The first official film was not produced until December 1915,2 but it was not until August 1916, with the release of Battle of the Somme, that officially sanctioned films reached mass audiences. It was largely official distaste for the populist medium of film, along with concerns about the effect of film on over-impressionable working-class audiences, that delayed governmental response. However, once it had recognized the potential of cinema, the War Office began to take it seriously and recruited author and scenarist Hall Caine, director Adrian Brunel and producer Charles Urban to the National War Aims Committee. Urban later toured the US between April 1917 and January 1918 with The Battle of the Somme, The Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of the Tanks and The German Retreat and the Battle of Arras, visiting over 1200 US cities between April 1917 and January 1918 to satisfy US audiences, hungry for images of the war in Europe. He made substantial


173

profits: $315,000 for The Battle of the Somme by January 1918 when it was still raising over $2000 per week – final proof, if proof were needed, that cinema had global financial and political benefits.3 The war’s outbreak in August 1914 came as no surprise, and if social conservatism and procrastination characterized the government’s response in deploying cinema,4 commercial producers were not so shy and Gaumont’s If England Were Invaded (Fred W. Durrant, 1913) pre-empted the war by several months. Otherwise, it was business as usual until September 1914, when a spate of fourteen, largely short, war-related films were released. This output peaked in October 1914 with a further nineteen films, but declined steadily throughout the remainder of the war. By December 1915, the monthly output was a single film; by 1918, there were only thirteen in the entire year. This trend must be understood in the context of an overall numerical decline in the British output due to short films being replaced by longer features and the deleterious effects of the war on the industry, but may also reflect a growing indifference to the subject by producers and audiences. In 1919, only four features about the war were produced, including Maurice Elvey’s Comradeship and Percy Nash’s The Flag Lieutenant; in 1920, only Thomas Bentley’s General Post; and in 1922, Three Live Ghosts, a comedy by George Fitzmaurice about three POWs returning from the ‘dead’. The early war films were largely dramatized propaganda: ‘calls to arms’, German spy peril and espionage dramas, and anti-pacifist tracts in which ‘cowardly’ characters are either punished or reformed by the process of enlisting. Titles such as Harold Shaw’s England’s Menace (June 1914), in which Edna Flugrath as the Prime Minister’s daughter foils a foreign invasion; Charles Weston’s Called to the Front (August 1914); Maurice Elvey’s Lest We Forget (September 1914); and Ethyl Batley’s Red Cross Pluck (December 1914), in which a nurse swims to warn troops of an impending attack, typify the genre and show entrepreneurial British producers exploiting the war for dramatic purposes. Comedy also flourished in these early months, with a prolific output of Pimple and Winky war parodies, indicating the speed at which the industry was able to satirize both itself and the war, which was, perhaps, yet to be taken seriously. We can interpret the ways in which the industry responded to the early days of war in terms of films produced, but how can we understand the culture in which they were exhibited? We know that


the outbreak of war saw an increase in working-class cinema attendance, with between 55 and 60 per cent being women and 10 per cent children.5 Cinemas were often packed, and by January 1917 21 million tickets were sold weekly and cinema was outselling all other social and sporting activities combined. Nicholas Hiley suggests that audiences then were less interested in the films than modern film historians are today, and many patrons attended cinema to soak up the communal atmosphere, meet friends and escape cramped and cold houses. As such, cinemas could be rowdy affairs, with audiences vocalizing their opinions of the material on screen and adding their own sound effects. It is hard to picture how serious war-related programmes and Roll of Honour films would have sat within this context and shifted it from a space of often raucous entertainment to a place of mourning.6 However, we can get a sense of this if we consider that war broke out just as the first boom in purpose-built cinemas, ‘picture palaces’, was peaking. The opportunity for profit that this boom offered to enterprising, and often local, entrepreneurs was brought under threat and exhibitors, as well as the industry itself, responded with patriotic programmes and events that played into the national feeling, but also gave the industry as a whole more respectability. Seen in this way, the place on the programme of the patriotic films and the Roll of Honour films makes sense. Nonetheless, any official material still needed to take into account the audience’s general distaste for ‘educational’ films. By the time the War Office began to appreciate the cinema’s potential in the war effort, much of the initial war fervour had dampened. However, their preference for fiction – specifically short comedies and serials, most of which were produced in the US – remained. That said, even as the US consolidated its stranglehold on the European cinema markets, anti-American feeling at US passivity in the face of German aggression was reported in London cinemas in 1916, when audiences repeatedly booed images of President Wilson on screen, while those of other Allied leaders were cheered. So consensual acceptance of all things American could not be taken for granted. For example, during the war Lord North accused Chaplin of shirking his duty.7 As we have said, cinemas as institutions also adapted in the early years. In addition to the nationwide instances of cinemas doubling as recruiting sites, with speeches from recruiting officers and


175

opportunities for men to enlist, they also galvanized charitable support and honoured those fighting by Roll of Honour photo displays in foyers as well as those on the screen. One important change saw the influx of women into the exhibition industry to replace enlisted men. Concurrently, the industry’s response to the increase in female participation was reflected in propaganda films aimed at women and the home front. When the government fully embraced cinema, alongside the official war films depicting the troops at the front, it developed the dramatized propaganda film with relative sophistication, enlisting well-known actors and exploiting melodramatic and comedic narrative devices and forms. Issues of class and gender, significant social divides, are mobilized in two extant examples in the IWM Collection. The Woman’s Portion (1918)8 is a surprisingly downbeat drama encouraging women to accept the absence of husbands and discouraging them from promulgating ideas of their desertion; a significant problem in the latter, dark days of the war. Lizzie, a working-class woman, struggles to maintain morale with a young child, insufficient funds and the daily fear of the dreaded telegram. On receiving a letter from her husband saying that he would willingly die for his country, given the German brutality he is witnessing, she dreams of him deserting. But her dream becomes a nightmare when her deserter husband is transformed into a shifty, bad-tempered fugitive who has sacrificed his name and dignity. She awakes understanding why he must remain at the front and announces that she would rather him dead than a deserter. The film shifts its emotional register and ends happily with his return, but deals explicitly with the physical and emotional hardships faced by women and the daily nightmare of receiving bad news from the front. If The Woman’s Portion instructed the working-class woman on accepting her lot, Everybody’s Business (1917)9 was, by contrast, concerned with persuading the rural rich of the need to downsize their gastronomic expectations and cut down on food waste. Here, a comfortable, middle-aged couple argue over the preparation of an ‘austerity meal’ for their guests and scold the servants for discarding seed potatoes and taking off too much peel. Produced by the Ministry of Food, the film features Matheson Lang and Gerald du Maurier among several well-known theatrical personalities who contributed their services to the war effort. These two films address both ends of


the social spectrum, but the bigger sacrifice lays with the working-class woman, who was struggling to cope with a young child and for whom, one assumes, the ‘austerity meal’ was not a choice. Numerically significant female audiences were a key target for official, emotionally exploitative propaganda that called for personal sacrifice in the face of widely accepted German brutality that, popular myth suggested, was directed at women and children. Another, less obviously propagandist example is The Last Lesson (1918?)10, set in a rural Alsace school in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War (a clear metaphor for the First World War), where the German language is now compulsory and the likeable old French teacher is being replaced by a German tyrant. The old teacher ponders whether one day all the flowers in the school garden will have German names and a truanting pupil inspires him to teach the eponymous last lesson in French grammar, because: ‘The language of a country is key to liberty, but when a country is conquered, both language and liberty are lost’. The film ends poignantly with the words ‘Vive La France’ fading into an image of a French flag. It stars one of the most prolific actors in British silent cinema, Henry Vibart, as the old teacher whose only form of resistance is through his native language. It is a curiously melancholy film, with capitulation to German rule imminent. In its emphasis on protecting language as culture, it pre-empts the Second World War films of Humphrey Jennings, which posit similar questions on post-war cultural reconstruction. The precise purpose of the film is unclear, but the war on the front needs the emotional and intellectual resistance of the home front to give it meaning and purpose. The extent to which the true business of the war had been hidden from the British public is illustrated by a report in the New York Times in 1916 that describes actuality footage, censored in the UK: Vivid pictures of the devastation in the trenches of Europe, so fearful that they can never be shown in England or France while the war lasts… surgeons at work on the shattered jaws and sometimes whole faces of the wounded. There was shown the effects of the ordeal in the trenches on some of the survivors… men who could not walk, men who were not able to sit still without trembling in every joint as if freezing or palsied with age, all bore witness that the soldier who received a kindly bullet in the brain was not always the unlucky man.11


177

The idea that a quick death was merciful did not manifest itself in film or commentary in Britain. Aside from medical films, actuality footage was limited to official films like The Battle of the Somme and Topical Budget items such as the Devonshire Hospital Buxton for wounded soldiers showing cheerfully rehabilitating Tommies, mugging for the camera while undergoing revolutionary steam and water treatments.12 Audiences then, as now, attended the cinema to escape everyday realities, and although the war permeated films for many years to come, war-related films were not the mainstay; that role belonged to comedies, serials and crime films.

Film in the early post-war period Cinema production in the post-war period was stimulated by the need to rebuild its finances and its damaged infrastructure, which had effectively gone into suspended animation during the war. British productions needed to compete with popular and populous US imports and the irrepressible rise of the Hollywood star system and its association with glamour and consumption. By 1922, the UK exhibition industry was worth around £3 million per year, but much of this revenue was paid back to US distributors due to long-term contracts for the supply of US films, signed during the war.13 The industry remained relatively poorly adjusted and feature films produced in the five years after the war often lost out due to inadequate or badly timed release strategies. In the early post-war period, dramas related to the mass audience experience and relived the war from an increasingly safe distance. Maurice Elvey’s Comradeship (January 1919), Thomas Bentley’s The General Post (1920) and Walter Summers’ A Couple of Down and Outs (1923) offered the hope of a more egalitarian society where love, hard work and goodwill could eradicate social divisions. Ideal’s The General Post, from a scenario and play by Eliot Stannard, begins in 1912 with a blossoming romance between Edward, a hardworking tailor, and Betty, the daughter of a snobbish lord who strongly disapproves of his daughter’s love interest. Edward is convinced that love cannot cross class boundaries and refuses Betty’s offer of elopement, but the war is a catalyst for change and opportunity. By 1916 Edward has achieved the rank of colonel and feels equal to an aristocratic marriage. This time it is Betty who refuses


and Edward returns to the front with his love unrequited. By the Armistice, Edward is now a brigadier general, having won a VC; this time, it is Sir Dennys, Betty’s father, who states his pride at the prospect of having Edward as a son-in-law, so the union can go ahead. Social miscegenation is acceptable, but only at the level of brigadier general. A Couple of Down and Outs (November 1923)14 tells the story of Danny, an out-of-work veteran who spots the horse he rode as an artilleryman being shipped to Belgium for horse meat. Unable to contemplate its dreadful fate, he steals the horse and the two go on the run. Molly Rourke, a policeman’s daughter, takes pity on the ‘down and outs’ and shelters them from the police, supported by her own kind-hearted father who turns a blind eye. The film is a touching portrait of the bond between a man and his faithful horse and a reminder of the plight faced by many returning soldiers – the lack of employment, homelessness and the need to trudge the country looking for work – not to mention the fate of the many horses that fought alongside them. The film avoids sentimentality by working within a realist framework, which offers a glimpse of the war’s aftermath with little space for sentiment in the face of human hardships. It also deals explicitly with the war in memory, as Danny recounts and exorcises his experiences at the front by talking to Molly. These scenes use a combination of actuality and reconstructed footage. The Bioscope reported: ‘The War episodes gave a good opportunity for bomb effects, as was demonstrated, a little too thoroughly, apparently, for the several feminine members of the audience at the Scala Trade Show’.15

The late silent period For the generation of cinéastes making films about the First World War in the later 1920s, there is an increasing emotional distance. A telling article in the Picturegoer describes the set of Adrian Brunel’s Blighty (1927), in which the actors obligingly take it in turns to play piano and sing ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ to create the requisite atmosphere and emotion while Brunel directed. Presumably this wartime favourite enabled the actors to emote more convincingly, with the distillation of memory and emotion into a song that has similar resonances today. The reporter then goes on to say that ‘Adrian


179

Brunel should provide some originality to a story of the levelling of class distinctions during the War’, but rather contradicts this by adding: The great atmosphere smacked of ancestral halls and if the richly solid furniture and decorative effects were not sufficient evidence of a long line of antiquity, the coat of arms over the fire place told a tale of dignity that could not be ignored...16 Social status was still a key dramatic device in many British films of this period, set among the idle classes in their country houses. Brunel had to be persuaded to direct Blighty, because he felt that audiences were now sick of war films and he himself hated what he saw as their pro-war representation of sacrifice and chivalry.17 He ultimately considered that Blighty was anti-war, but to contemporary audiences its representation of social equality is still unresolved. Despite Brunel’s doubts about war subjects, 1927 also saw the release of New Era’s re-enactment film of The Somme, directed by M. A. Wetherell, which The Bioscope described as ‘a spectacular and dignified presentment of a great achievement… A generous tribute to the courage and fighting qualities of the enemy and… the entire absence of that mawkish sentimentality which is introduced into most films’, suggesting that patience was wearing thin with references to ‘white haired mothers or broken-hearted wives and sisters’.18 The Somme was followed by a further two New Era reenactments, Q Ships (1928) and Blockade (1932), indicating audience interest in this subgenre of films that combined actuality and staged footage to recreate major battles. In terms of comedy, the longevity of cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather’s Old Bill character is evidenced by the 1926 Warner Brothers remake of The Better Ole, starring Syd Chaplin. Old Bill had been the subject of several earlier films, including Welsh and Pearson’s The Better Ole or the Romance of Old Bill (1918), which was immediately spoofed by Fred and Joe Evans in Pimple’s Better Ole (1918) and later reprised in Old Bill Through the Ages (1924) by Thomas Bentley. However, comedic responses to the war were not universally acceptable and in 1928, the French issued a blanket ban on all comedy in films depicting the war. The Cinematograph Français reported that ‘comedy in War films is an insult to the French dead and French people, nearly all of whom suffered from personal loss’.19 Furthermore, all films


‘Old Bill’ (Syd Chaplin) and his two chums in The Better ‘Ole (Charles Reisner, 1926).

produced in France after 1 January 1928 showing any scenes of the war would not be issued with a certificate. Such was the intensity of feeling a decade after the end of the conflict. In the UK, too, there was a tendency towards more serious and soul-searching films dealing with sensitive areas. The controversy surrounding Herbert Wilcox’s 1928 film Dawn about Nurse Edith Cavell, executed by the Germans for assisting prisoners of war, was refused a certificate by the BBFC until scenes of the execution were cut in response to German sensitivity. By the late 1920s, there was a sense that war subjects were beginning to pall and the Chicago Daily Tribune began its review of the film with misgivings at ‘yet another film designed to make money out of the War, when all the world was striving for recovery and yearning for peace’, although it wholeheartedly concedes to the producers’ claims that the film was indeed an indictment against all wars.20 Dawn also reflected the strength of feeling across Europe. In Geneva in August 1928, possibly in response to the Dawn controversy, John


181

Galsworthy called for a resolution to ban all war films that incited ill will between nations.21

Early sound films Perhaps the darkest of all films about the war produced during this late period was James Whale’s magisterial early talkie Journey’s End (1930), whose background soundtrack of incessant booming explosions creates a hellish aural soundscape, while simultaneously detracting from the rather stilted delivery of the dialogue, which was due both to the limitations of early recording technology and the film’s provenance as a stage play.22 His film, like All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)23, creatively fuses image, sound and dialogue to convey the psychological stresses of trench warfare. That European cinema was also dealing with the psychological horrors of trench warfare is perhaps indicated in Heinz Paul’s German version of Journey’s End, Der Anderen Seite: The Other Side (1931), which tells the same story of human annihilation from a German perspective and was banned by the Nazis in 1933 as the inexorable march towards the next war gathered momentum.

So, how shall we look again? For the archivist and programmer, the question of how we ‘look again’ is a key one. Does the passage of time make a substantive difference to the way we present films concerned with personal grief or other sensitive issues to audiences today? One might expect that the raw emotional reaction to these films at the time they were released would be lessened incrementally as the years go by, but the situation may not be so simple. Those who had been caught up in those events would have one set of reactions, their children another and their grandchildren another still. But even as the memories of the conflict fade in the third generation, there has been a resurgence of interest in the Great War through literature, historical writings, films and the massive expansion of family history made possible by the internet. Not only is this interest leading to a more detailed understanding of the period, it is also leading to a new level of personal engagement with the past for thousands of people. At screenings of The Battle of the Somme (1916) and of the Preston Roll of Honour film, the response of audiences seemed to indicate that the real,


the individual story, the actual names and faces continue to have the power to move us. It still seems appropriate, then, that the responsibility of the archive is to ensure a certain respectful treatment of these particular films. In a sense, they are memorials to individuals and should be presented to the audience with as much context as can be provided. Toby Haggith and the Imperial War Museum’s screenings of the original recommended score for The Battle of the Somme is one example of the archive’s role in guiding the public presentation of these films. Where this does not exist, it is important that public use of this material remains sensitive, without being faux patriotic or mawkish. This material is evidently still capable of engendering strong responses. Twenty-first-century programmers and archivists must consider this complex range of likely reactions to the films and their musical accompaniment. The other exciting thing that the archive programmer can do, which is connected most particularly with the actuality film, is to present different and unexpected views of a period of history that is often represented by a narrow selection of imagery: rendered down by cartoons and static theatre sets, the shorthand of no-man’s-land, muddy craters and blasted trees, trench dugouts and field hospitals – the setting of innumerable dramas and comedies.24 The Battle of the Somme, filmed in summer 1916, is devoid of mud and shows open vistas of dry, flat fields, so at odds with the oft-repeated images we have come to know. Other surprises from the films of the war or of the immediate aftermath, rather than those made once the mythologizing was underway, would include films from less familiar theatres of the war – the early naval battle films of Walter Summers, the home front and the Land Girls that we associate so closely with the Second World War – or might include the horrific medical films of the era, never of course shown in cinemas. It is essential to get across to audiences the historical context in which these films were made and seen, and for them to remember how young the cinema was at the outbreak of war. Purpose-built cinemas, which had been spreading since 1909, had been around for barely three years in most places; the feature film and regularly produced newsreels had been around for two. The first official reaction of a government with no experience of the mass form of communication that cinema would become was to consider closing them down, and actually to forbid filming at the front. However, people starved


183

of information and distraction flocked to the picture houses. The second reaction was to lighten restrictions on newsreel producers and to let through tightly controlled reports followed by the first official film, The Battle of the Somme, intended to demonstrate the government’s concern for the people and to start managing the expectations of a population that was about to face the very different world of forced conscription and the total war economy. The idea still prevalent in 1916 that you might recognize a relative or friend in films coming from the front was soon quashed by the staggering numbers; by the dark days of 1917, relatively few Rolls of Honour films that listed the names of individuals missing or killed were shown in local cinemas. From an archivist’s point of view, the strength of being able to programme from a large, rather random collection is that the apocalyptic mood of the black year of 1917 surfaces in unexpected places, such as a cartoon film made by Dudley Buxton called Ever Been Had? (1917). The film depicts a moon-man come down to Earth and finding a war survivor, who tells how the war was fought to the last man, with terrifying portrayals of great tanks rolling over the ruins of London and death rays that destroy the British Navy. Smuggled into this insignificant little comedy are the beginnings of a cynicism that will turn to disillusion, then anti-patriotism and pacifism in the inter-war years. In the same year, as Michael Hammond quotes in his book The Big Show, the head of the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association for London observed how the mood had changed from grief stricken but engaged to not wanting to hear about it: The quiet film, the placid story does not appeal at the moment to people whose nerves are jangled and strained by worry and loss. They seek distraction with an avidity and feverishness which is quite natural but not normal.25 This goes some way to explaining the small number of feature dramas concerning the war made domestically at that time. Apart from the difficulties of making film at all, it seems that the audience wanted westerns and Chaplin comedies. After the war features began to be made that began the process of mythologizing the conflict. Where early war-related films were preoccupied with bravery versus cowardice, the later films were preoccupied with repairing society: how to deal with the working-class chauffeur who was braver in battle than


his upper-class employer, how to live vicariously through the children of dead loved ones, how to cope with a wounded husband. The seeming blandness of these dramas needs to be contextualized too, for it was a while afterwards, once everyone had buried their dead and regrouped, that films begin to exhibit the anger that we associate with the First World War drama. The memory of the Great War as conveyed through British cinema history is a critical part of the memorialization of the war. The archives’ holdings are crucial not only in helping to recognize how this memory has been shaped, but also in playing a part in continuing to provide the materials for a rigorous history of this process. The scholars of this volume have begun this process. When these materials are more fully researched, they will offer a different, more nuanced understanding of the war and the role of cinema in shaping public perceptions beyond the simplistic idea that the public were duped by propaganda. Myths such as these are resilient and trying to persuade an audience that has been brought up on All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Journey’s End (1930), Oh! What a Lovely War (Richard Attenborough, 1969), Gallipoli (Peter Weir, 1981) or Regeneration (Gillies MacKinnon, 1997) to ‘look again’ is a real challenge.

Notes 1. Wilfred Wilson Gibson, ‘Lament’ (first stanza), Collected Poems 1905–1925 (London: Macmillan, 1926), also available at http://net.lib.byu.edu/ english/WWI/poets/Lament.html [accessed 1 November 2010]. 2. Britain Prepared, December 1915. 3. The Washington Post, 17 January 1918, 4. 4. The American ambassador warned of the success of German propaganda with impressionable audiences. The reluctance to embrace cinema was due to officials’ overall distaste of the perceived working-class medium and the desire not to replicate the staged examples of the Boer War, but to produce actualities. The newsreel was only a couple of years old and there were practical issues with getting cameramen to the front. See Nicholas Reeves, ‘Official British Film Propaganda’, in Michael Paris (ed.), The First World War and Popular Cinema 1914 to the Present (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 28. 5. Nicholas Hiley, ‘The British Cinema Auditorium’, in Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp (eds), Film and the First World War (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), p. 162. 6. See Hammond and Williams’ introduction to this volume.


185

7. ‘Allies Despise All Americans: Wilson Hissed in London Film Show’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 6 Feb 1916, 3; on Chaplin, see Hammond, The Big Show: British Cinema Culture in the Great War (1914–1918) (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2006), p. 231. 8. The Woman’s Portion (1918), prod. Film Producers’ Guild, GB. Imperial War Museum no. 522. 9. Everybody’s Business (June 1917), aka Civilians Fall In, prod. Ministry of Food/Western Import Company, GB. Imperial War Museum no. 516. 10. The Last Lesson (1918?), producer unknown, GB. Imperial War Museum no. 525. The film is not mentioned in Henry Vibart’s filmographies. 11. ‘War Surgery Shown in Moving Pictures: Films Here Portray Removal of Shrapnel Ball from a Living Man’s Heart’, New York Times, 7 Oct 1916, 11. 12. Topical Budget 268-2 (1916). 13. In ‘Cinema and the Memory of the Great War’, in Paris, The First World War, p. 15, Pierre Sorlin asserts that most visual constructions of the war in its aftermath were American in origin and that most visual and literary accounts were produced a decade later. However, this does not take into account British films produced in the immediate aftermath. 14. Produced by G. B. Samuelson, this is a rarely seen film that survives in the Nederlands Film Archive. 15. The Bioscope, 22 November 1923, 63. 16. E. E. Barrett in Picturegoer, February 1927. 17. Adrian Brunel, Nice Work (London: Forbes Robertson, 1949), p. 126. 18. The Bioscope, 8 Sept 1927. 19. ‘Comedy in War Films Is Banned by France’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 January 1928. 20. ‘Our Critic Eats a Few Words about Dawn: Finds Film an Indictment of all Wars’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 4 September 1928. 21. ‘Galsworthy Asks Curb on all War Breeding Films’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 August 1928. 22. Based on the play by A. C. Sherrif and first performed on 9 December 1928 at the Apollo Theatre in London. The film was released in April 1930 in the US and the UK. 23. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), directed by Lewis Milestone, based on the book by Erich Maria Remarque. 24. For example the 1989 BBC comedy Blackadder Goes Forth, with its nihilistic final scene. 25. Hammond, The Big Show, p. 1. Hammond cites F. R. Goodwin, Chairman of the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association, London Branch, in National Council of Public Morals [NCPM], The Cinema: Its Present Position and Future Possibilities (London: Williams and Norgate, 1917 [New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1970]), p. 1.

References Agate, James, The Contemporary Theatre, 1926 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1927). Angell, Norman, The Great Illusion (London: Heinemann, 1911). Angell, Norman, The Great Illusion Now (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938). Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Ingram Bywater, On the Art of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), pp. 52–3. Arthur, Max, When This Bloody War Is Over: Soldiers’ Songs of the First World War (London: Piatkus, 2001). Atkinson, C.T. The Royal Hampshire Regiment, Volume Two, 1914–1918, (Glasgow: Glasgow University Press, 1952). Badsey, S.D. ‘Battle of the Somme: British War Propaganda’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 3 (1983), 99–115. Bailey, Peter (ed.), Music Hall: Business and Pleasure (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986). Bamford, Kenton, Distorted Images (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999). Barker, Pat, The Eye in the Door (London: Penguin, 1994). Barthes, Roland, S/Z (London: Cape, 1975). Bennett, Alan, Forty Years On, Act 2 (London: Faber & Faber, 1996). Bennett, Geoffrey, The Battles of the Coronel and Falkland Islands (London: Batsford, 1962). Beresford Ellis, Peter & Williams, Piers, By Jove, Biggles! (London: W. H. Allen, 1981). Bishop, Alan (ed.), Chronicle of Youth: Vera Brittain’s War Diary 1913–1917 (London: Book Club Associates, 1981). Bourke, Joanna, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996). Bourke, Joanna, An Intimate History of Killing (London: Granta, 2000). Bratton, J.S., ‘Of England, Home and Duty’, in John M. Mackenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), pp. 83–4. Brittain, Vera, Testament of Youth [1933] (London: Virago, 1978). Brown, David K., The Grand Fleet: Warship Development 1905–23 (London: Chatham, 1999). Brunel, Adrian, Nice Work (London: Forbes Robertson, 1949). Bruno, Giuliana, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Burke, Thomas, Son of London (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1946). Calder, Angus, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Pimlico, 1992). Calder, Angus, The People’s War: Britain, 1939–45 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969). 186

References 187

Carey, John (ed.), The Faber Book of Reportage (London: Faber, 1987). Carlyle, Thomas, ‘Lectures on Heroes: On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History’, in Thomas Carlyle’s Works (London: Chapman and Hall, 1888), pp. 183–375. Caruth, Cathy (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Churchill, Winston, The World Crisis 1911–14 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923). Clark, Alan, The Donkeys (London: Pimlico, 1991). Conan Doyle, Arthur, Rodney Stone [1896] (London: John Murray, 1948). Conan Doyle, Adrian, The True Conan Doyle (London: John Murray, 1945). Cunningham, Valentine, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). DeGroot, Gerard J., Blighty: British Society in the Great War (London: Longman, 1996). Denny, Ludwell, America Conquers Britain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930). Discher, M. Willson, Melodrama: Plots that Thrilled (London: Rockliff, 1954). Ecksteins, Modris, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (London, 1989). Ellul, Jacques, Propaganda (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965). Faquharson, A.S.L. (tr.), The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Field, Audrey, Picture Palace: A Social History of the Cinema (London: Gentry Books, 1974). Foss, M., Der See und Kolonialkrieg I (Halle: Saale-Mühlmam, 1919). Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Gibson, Wilfred Wilson, Collected Poems 1905–1925 (London: Macmillan, 1926). Gledhill, Christine, Reframing British Cinema 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion (London: BFI, 2003). Grahame, Kenneth, Penguin Kenneth Grahame (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983). Graves, Robert, Goodbye to All That (London: Penguin, 1960). Gregory, Adrian, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 1919–1946 (Oxford: Berg, 1994). Haggith, Toby, ‘Reconstructing the Musical Arrangement for The Battle of the Somme (1916)’, Film History, 14:1 (2002), 11–24. Haining, Peter, The Classic Era of Crime Fiction (London: Prion Books, 2002). Halpern, Paul G., A Naval History of World War I (London: UCL Press, 1994). Hammond, Michael, ‘ “The Men Who Came Back”: Anonymity and Recognition in Local British Roll of Honour Films (1914–1918)’, Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, University of Nottingham, 2000. Hammond, Michael, ‘ “The Big Show”: Cinema Exhibition and Reception in Britain in the Great War’, unpublished PhD thesis, Nottingham Trent University, 2001, pp. 240–41.

188

References

Hammond, Michael, The Big Show: British Cinema Culture in the Great War (1914–1918) (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2006). Hepworth, Cecil, Came the Dawn: Memories of a Film Pioneer (London: Phoenix House, 1951). Hibberd, Dominic (ed.), Wilfred Owen: War Poems and Others (London, Chatto and Windus, 1973). Hiley, Nicholas, ‘Making War: The British News Media and Government Control, 1914–16’, PhD thesis, Open University, 1985. Hiley, Nicholas, ‘The British Cinema Auditorium’, in Karel Dibbets & Bert Hogenkamp (eds), Film and the First World War (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), pp. 160–70. Hollingdale, R.J. (ed.), A Nietzsche Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). Holmes, Richard, Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front (London: Harper Perennial, 2005). Howard, Michael, Clausewitz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). Hynes, Samuel, A War Imagined (London: Pimlico, 1990). Jellicoe, Admiral Viscount, The Grand Fleet 1914–16 [1919] (London: Cassell, 1922). Joll, James, The Origins of the First World War (London: Longman, 1992). Kant, Immanuel, Perpetual Peace [1795] (London: Allen and Unwin, 1903). Kazmier, Lisa, ‘Leading the World: The Role of Britain and the First World War in Promoting the Modern Cremation Movement’, Journal of Social History, 42:3 (Spring 2009), 557–79. Keegan, John, The First World War: An Illustrated History (London: Pimlico, 2002). Kelly, Andrew, Cinema and the Great War (London: Routledge, 1997). King, Alex, Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembering (Oxford: Berg, 1998). Legg, Stuart, Jutland: An Eye Witness (London: Hart-Davis, 1966). Lejeune, C.A., Cinema (London: Alexander Maclehose, 1931). Low, Rachael, The History of the British Film 1918–1929 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971). Low, Rachael, A History of the British Film IV [1971] (London: Routledge, 1997). Low, Rachael, Documentary and Educational Films of the 1930s (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979). Low, Rachael, The History of the British Film, 1914–1918 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1950). Lowe, R., ‘The Ministry of Labour, 1916–1919: A Still, Small Voice?’, in Kathleen Burk (ed.), The War and the State (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982). Malins, Geoffrey H. (ed. Low Warren), How I Filmed the War (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1920). Marcus, Laura, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Marcus, Laura, Friedberg, Anne & Donald, James (eds.), Close Up, 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism (London: Cassell, 1998). Mayer, Peter (ed.), The Pacifist Conscience (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966).

References 189

McKernan, Luke, Topical Budget: The Great British News Film (London: BFI, 1992). Mee, Arthur, The Children’s Encyclopaedia III (London: Educational Book Company, 1925). National Council of Public Morals: Cinema Commission of Inquiry, The Cinema: Its Present Position and Future Possibilities (London: Williams and Norgate, 1917). Nietzsche, Friedrich (trans. R. J. Hollingdale), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (London: Penguin, 1969). Paris, Michael, The First World War and Popular Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). Peel, C.S., How We Lived Then 1914–1918: A Sketch of Social and Domestic Life in England During the War (London: Bodley Head, 1929). Rapp, Dean, ‘Sex in the Cinema: War, Moral Panic, and the British Film Industry, 1906–1918’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 34:3 (2002), 422–51. Reeves, Nicholas, ‘Cinema, Spectatorship and Propaganda: “Battle of the Somme” (1916) and its Contemporary Audience’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 17:1 (1997), 5–28. Reeves, Nicholas, Official Film Propaganda During the First World War, (London: Croom Helm, 1986). Reeves, Nicholas, ‘Official British Film Propaganda’, in Michael Paris (ed.), The First World War and Popular Cinema 1914 to the Present (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 27–50. Robb, George, British Culture and the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Rogerson, Sidney, Propaganda in the Next War (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1938). Sanders, Lise Shapiro. ‘ “Indecent Incentives to Vice”: Regulating Films and Audience Behaviour From the 1890s to the 1910s’, in Andrew Higson (ed.), Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain, 1895–1930 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), pp. 97–110. Sargeant, Amy, ‘Do We Need Another Hero?’, in Claire Monk & Amy Sargeant (eds), British Historical Cinema (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 15–30. Sargeant, Amy, ‘Utopia, Dystopia and Eutopia between the Wars’, in Laraine Porter & Alan Burton (eds), Scene-Stealing (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 2003), pp. 94–101. Schickel, Richard, D.W. Griffith and the Birth of Film (London: Pavilion Books, 1984). Silkin, J. (ed.), The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981). Smither, Roger (ed.), The Battles of the Somme and Ancre (Department of Film, Imperial War Museum and DD Video, 1993). Smither, Roger, Imperial War Museum Film Catalogue Volume One: The First World War Archive (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1994). Spufford, Francis, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London: Faber, 1997).

190

References

Stafford, David, ‘Spies and Gentlemen: The Birth of the British Spy Novel, 1893–1914’, Victorian Studies 24:4 (Summer 1981), pp. 489–509. Sussex, Elizabeth, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary: The Story of the Film Movement Founded by John Grierson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975). Taylor, Lou, Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983). Taylor, Philip M., Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Era (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Taylor, S.J., The Great Outsiders: Northcliffe, Rothermere and the Daily Mail (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996). Van Emden, Richard & Humphries, Steve, All Quiet on the Home Front: An Oral History of Life in Britain During the First World War (London: Headline, 2004). Weissberg, Jay, ‘Singing With a Purpose: Wartime Propaganda and Other Themes’, Senses of Cinema, http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/ festivals/05/37/ritrovato2005.html [accessed 27 October 2010]. Wilcox, Herbert, Twenty-Five Thousand Sunsets: The Autobiography of Herbert Wilcox (London: Bodley Head, 1967). Williams, H.N., Sir Douglas Haig’s Great Push: The Battle of the Somme (London: Hutchinson, 1916). Williams, Michael, Ivor Novello: Screen Idol (London: BFI, 2003). Wilson, Sandy, Ivor (London: Michael Joseph, 1975). Winter, Jay, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Official papers and contemporary journals Altrincham, Bowden and Hale Guardian The Bioscope The Cambrian Chicago Daily Tribune Church Times The Cinema Cinémiroi Close Up The Criterion Daily Express Daily Mail Daily Mirror Daily News Daily Sketch Daily Telegraph Evening Express Evening News

References 191

Evening Standard Film Censor Film Renter Film Weekly Fortean Times The Gentlewoman Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly Kinematograph Monthly Film Record Liverpool Post Manchester Guardian Market Harborough Advertiser Nottingham Guardian Moving Picture Offered List National Archives: Public Record Office New Age New York Times Observer Picture Show Picture Stories Magazine Pictures and the Picturegoer The Referee Royal Academy Illustrated Sight and Sound Southern Daily Echo South Wales Gazette and Newport News Stoll Herald Sunday Express Sunday Pictorial Sunday Times Sydenham Gazette Times Variety Washington Post Westminster Gazette Yorkshire Evening Press Yorkshire Observer

Index Agate, James, 94, 104 All Quiet On The Western Front (novel), 111 All Quiet On The Western Front (film, 1930), 116, 137, 140, 181, 184 Answering the Call (1914), 46 Angell, Norman, 85–6, 87 Armageddon (1923), 113 Armistice Day, 148, 172 Asquith, Anthony, 3 Attenborough, Richard, 184 Aurelius, Marcus, 89 Badsey, Stephen, 19 Balcon, Michael, 106 Balfour, Lord Arthur, 22 Batley, Ernest, 40 Batley, Ethyle, 46, 173 Battle for Haditha, The (2007), 14 Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands, The (1928), 12, 79–92, 113, 137 Battle of Jutland, The (1921), 113 Battle of Loos, The, 120 Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of the Tanks, The (1917), 172 Battle of the Somme, The (1916), (film), 3, 4, 6, 14, 19–38, 46, 125, 141, 142–3, 146, 152, 172, 173, 177, 181, 182, 183 Battle of the River Plate, The (1956), 85 Battle of Waterloo, The (1913), 39 Bells of Rheims, The (1914), 43, 46 Ben Hur (1925), 127 Bennett, Alan, 139 Bentley, Thomas, 96, 173, 177, 179 Better ‘Ole or the Romance of Old Bill, The (1918), 179 Better ‘Ole, The (1926), 179

Big Parade, The (1925), 10, 99, 100, 127 Bioscope, The, 43, 45, 127, 179 Birth of a Nation, The (1915), 21, 23, 25 Blackwood’s Magazine, 40 Blighty (1927), 87, 96, 141, 170, 178, 179 Blockade (1932), 179 Borzage, Frank, 13 Bourke, Joanna, 10, 113 Boy Scouts, 148 Bramble, A. V., 99 Brand, Neil, 14 Bromhead, A. E., 102 Britain’s Effort, 168 Britain Prepared, (1915) British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), 49, 61, 180 British and Colonial Kinematograph Company (B&C), 5, 39–48, 72 British Instructional Pictures, 113 British Women’s Patriotic League, 99 Broken in the Wars (1918), 7–9 Brooke, Rupert, 97, 98 Brunel, Adrian, 87, 96, 141, 178, 179 Bruno, Giuliana, 31 Bryan, Jane, 5, 64–76 Buchwald, Gunther, 141 Burke, Thomas, 79 Buxton, Dudley, 183 Cabinets des Dr. Caligari, Das (1919), 137 Calder, Angus, 161–2 Carli, Phil, 141 Called to the Front (1914), 173 Carlyle, Thomas, 89 Carroll, Madeleine, 118 Caruth, Cathy, 131 192

Index

Cavell, Edith, 139, 140, 180 Cenotaph, 144, 148, 172 Chaplin, Charles, 4, 174, 183 Chaplin, Syd, 179–80 Chamberlain, Austin, 82 Charrington,. Frederick, 53–5 Childers, Erskine, 85, 139 Choles, Claude, 1 Christie’s Maritime Sale, 79 Churchill, Winston, 75, 82, 83 Cinema, The, 44 Cinema Exhibitors Association (CEA), 7, 57–61, 183 Cinematograph Act of 1909, 55 Cinematograph Act of 1927, 109 Cinematograph Français, 179–80 Cinema Trade Council (CTC), 58 Close-up, 3, 80 Collier, Lionel 127–8 Commissioner of Police Report on Cinematograph Picture Halls (1916), 51–2 Comradeship (1919), 84, 87, 98, 177 Cooper, Miriam, 75 Cornelius, Henry, 84 Cornwell, Jack, 79 Couple of Down and Outs, A (1924), 112, 116, 177 Coward, Noël, 84 Cowan, Lady, 99 Cradock, Christopher, 80, 90 Cradock, Col. Montague, 82 Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, 57 Crocombe, Leonard, 41, 72 The Crossed Flags (1914), 42, 46 Cutts, Graham, 11, 95, 96, 97–9 Dalrymple, Ian, 106 Dangerfield, Fred, 64 Davies, Capt. R., 99–100 Davis, Rex, 112 Dawn (1928), 82, 170, 180–1 The Dawn Patrol, (1930), 140 Day in the Life of a Munitions Worker, A (1917), 166

193

de Mille, Cecil B., 80 del Riccio, Lorenzo, 127 Derby, Lord, 148, 149 Dixon, Bryony, 9 Du Maurier, Gerald, 175 Durrant, Fred, 173 Earl of Stamford Unveils the Chapel Street Roll of Honour 5 April 1919, The (1919), 147–8 Ecksteins, Modris, 19–20 Edwards, Pvt. F., 144 Edwards, Henry, 7 Educational Kinematograph Association, 49 Ellerman, Winifred, 80–2, 89 Ellul, Jacques, 88 Elvey, Maurice, 41, 43–4, 45, 79, 80, 87, 95, 98, 99–106, 173, 177 England Expects (1914), 72 England’s Menace (1914), 173 Englishman’s Home, An (1914), 40, 41, 43, 72–3 Evans, Fred, 179 Evans, Joe, 179 Ever Been Had (1917), 141, 183 Everybody’s Business (1917), 175 Farquharson, Col. Arthur, 89 Farewell to Arms, A (1932), 13 Father and Lather, 165 Feud in the Kentucky Hills, A (1912), 24 Fighting U-Boats in a London Back Garden (1918), 165 Film Renter, The, 32 Film Weekly, The, 106 First Born, The, (1928), 95, 96, 106–7 Fitzmaurice, George, 173 Flag Lieutenant, The, (1920) 173 Flames of Passion, (1922) 96 Florence Nightingale, (1915) 45–6 Flugrath, Edna, 173 For the Empire (1916), 165 Forty Years On (play, 1968), 139 Four Just Men, The (1921), 153

194

Index

Frankenstein (1931), 128 Frend, Charles, 89 Fussell, Paul, 2, 10, 94, 102, 110, 111, 124, 138 Gallipolli (1981), 184 Gance, Abel, 80 General Post, The (1920), 96, 121, 140, 173, 177 General Strike, The 1926, 9, 121, 149 German Retreat and the Battle of Arras, The (1917), 172 German Spy Peril, The (1914), 139 Gibson, Wilfred Wilson, 170 Gledhill, Christine, 9, 10, 11, 94–107, 124 Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), 14 Goodbye To All That (autobiography, 1929), 140 Goodwin, F. R., 59 Grahame, Kenneth, 79 Graves, Robert, 3, 14 Gregory, Adrian, 99 Great War in England of 1897, The (novel, 1894), 40 Griffith, D. W., 21, 22 Guilbert-Ford, Lena, 124 Guns of Loos, The (1928), 9, 12, 14, 44, 95, 98, 118–33, 137–8, 141, 170 Haggis, Paul, 14 Haggith, Toby, 9, 125, 138, 141, 145–58, 168, 182 Haldane, Bert, 139 Hamilton, Emma, 79 Hammond, Michael, 3, 4, 72, 140, 146, 183 Hartwell, Mrs., (Chair of NUWW), 55 Havoc (1925), 105 Hawks, Howard, 140 Heap Big Chief (1919), 153 Hearts of the World (1918), 22 Henry, Sir Edward, 52, 55 Henson, H. Hensley, 36

Hepworth, Cecil, 7, 79, 96 Hepworth Manufacturing Company, 3, 7, 8, 39, 165 Heroes For Sale (1933), 14 High Treason (1929) 84 Hill, Sinclair, 9, 95, 98, 118–33, 137–8 Hindle Wakes (1927), 80 Hitchcock, Alfred, 3, 80, 96 Hodge, John, 7, 9 Hoffman, Renaud, 10, 99 Hollywood cinema, 3, 11, 13, 99, 109–10, 177 Holmes, Richard, 138 Homecoming of the Unknown Soldier (1921), 151 Horne, Stephen, 141 Hoskins, Sir Reginald, 153 Hurley, Frank, 88 I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), 14 ‘I Vow To Thee My Country’ (hymn), 139 If England Were Invaded (1913), 173 Ill Met By Moonlight (1957), 85 Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive, 2, 6, 138, 146, 148, 153, 168, 175, 182 Informer, The (1912), 23 In Which We Serve (1942), 84 In the Valley of Elah (2007), 14 Isherwood, Christopher, 123 ‘It’s a Long Long Way to Tipperary’ (song, 1912), 44 It’s a Long Long Way to Tipperary (film, 1914), 43–5 J’Accuse (1919), 80, 127 Jellicoe, Admiral Lord, 79, 83 Jennings, Humphrey, 176 Joan the Woman (1916), 80 Journey’s End (1930), 14, 115, 116, 140, 141, 181, 184 Journey’s End, Der Anderen Seite: The Other Side (1931), 181

Index

Keegan, John, 40 ‘Keep The Home Fires Burning’ (song, 1914), 44, 124–5, 131, 178 Kerr, Admiral Mark, 82, 87 Kinematograph Weekly, 28–9, 43, 45, 51, 98, 104, 106, 109, 110, 127 King, Alex, 80, 88 King, W. Gavazzi, 58 King’s Tour around the Napier Motor Works, The, 163 King Visits His Armies in the Great Advance, The, 163 Kipling, Rudyard, 89 Kitchener, Earl Horatio Herbert, 41, 65 Kitty (1929), 96, 98 Knowles, Harley, 88 La Grand Illusion (1937), 84 The Lads from the Village (1919), 137 Land of Hope and Glory (1927), 88 Lang, Fritz, 120, 141, 141 Lang, Matheson, 175 Last Lesson, The (1918?), 176 Le Quex, William, 40 Lejeune, Caroline, 80, 82, 83 Leroy, Mervyn, 14 Lest We Forget (1914), 173 Liddell Hart, Basil, 161 Life at Iwerne Minster in War-Time, 168 Liveliness on the British Front (1916), 146 Lloyd George, David, 5, 9, 34, 85, 88, 121, 163 Lloyd, Harold, 153 Lodger, The (1927), 80 London: British Fact and German Fiction (1917), 163 London County Council, 50, 51–3, 61 London Film Company, 39, 72, 75 Loraine, Harry, 137 Lost Patrol, The, (1929), 116 Low, Rachael, 3, 111

195

MacKinnon, Gilles, 184 MacKendrick, Alexander, 84 McCardle, Donald, 118 McDowell, J. B., 46 Mademoiselle from Armentièrs (1926 ), 84, 95, 96, 99–106 Magnascope , 127 Malins, Geoffrey, 35 Man Who Came Back, The (1915), 23, 140 Man Who Forgot, The (1919), 96 Manders, Miles 95, 96, 106–7 Manxman, The (1916), 96 Manxman, The (1928), 96 Marx, Karl, 87 Massacre, The (1912), 23 Masterman, Charles, 22 Maudes, Arthur, 12 McKernan, Luke, 66 Menin Gate Memoiral, 143 Metropolis (1926), 120, 129, 130 Midkiff-DeBauche, Leslie, 4 Milestone, Lewis, 116, 137 Ministry of Food, 175 Ministry of Information, 161 Ministry of Labour, 9 Mitchell, Oswald, 118 Mons (1926), 81, 82, 94, 95, 99, 113 Moody, Paul, 6–7, 49–63 Morgenrot (1933), 13 Mostow, Jonathan, 10 Mrs. John Bull Prepared (1918), 166 Napper, Lawrence, 10, 11, 12 Nash, Percy, 173 National Council of Public Morals, Cinema Commission Report 1917 (NCPM), 6–7, 27–8, 49, 58–61 National Film and Television Archive, 2, 6, 9 National Registration Act, 1915, 58 National Union of Women Workers (NUWW), 55, 59 Nelson, Lord Horatio, 79, 89 Nelson: The Story of England’s Immortal Naval Hero (1919), 79, 87

196

Index

Nepean, Edith, 11 New Era Films, 122, 179 New Version, The (1918), 165 Newbould A. E., 58, 59 North, Lord, 174 Novello, Ivor, 44, 94, 124 O’Connor, T. P., 61 Old Bill Through the Ages (1924), 179 Old Father William, 168 Onda, Will, 5, 6 Owen, Wilfred, 14, 36, 138, 141 Paris, Michael, 80 Parker, Gilbert, 22 Parliament, 57 The Passionate Adventure (1924), 95 Passport to Pimlico (1949), 84 Pearse, Alfred, 68 Pearson, George, 3, 95 Peel, Dorothy, 69 Pickford, Mary, 4 Pictures and the Picturegoer, 5, 39, 41, 64–76, 178 Pictures and Pleasures, 41 Picture Show, 11, 118, 120, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127 Pimple (see also Fred Evans), 173 Pimple’s Better ‘Ole (1918), 179 Pipes of Pan, The (1923), 96 Plant and Operations Manufacture of Gasmasks (1917), 166 Poppies of Flanders (1927), 12 Porter, Laraine, 9 post-traumatic stress disorder, 10 Powell, Michael and Pressburger, Emeric, 85 Preston Roll of Honour Film (1915), 181 Prince of Wales in Glasgow, The (1918), 163 Public Welcome to Service Men (1919), 148 Q Ships (1928), 113, 179

Rapp, Dean, 61 Reed, Herbert, 111 Reeves, Nicholas, 20, 32, 34 Red Cross Pluck (1914), 173 Regeneration (1997), 184 Remembrance Day, 19, 138, 144 Renoir, Jean, 85 Reveille (1924), 95 Reville, Alma, 106 The Riddle of the Sands (novel, 1903), 85, 139 Risdon, Elizabeth, 43, 45 Robb, George, 41, 46 Rogerson, Sydney, 161 Roll of Honour films, 5–6, 32, 71, 138, 139, 141, 144, 146, 175 ‘Roses of Picardy’ (Song 1916), 44 St Helier, Lady, 52 Sassoon, Siegfried, 14, 138, 141, 143 Saville, Victor, 96, 98, 102 Saving Private Ryan (1998), 10 Sargeant, Amy, 12, 79–92 Scott, Capt. Robert Falcon, 89, 90 Second World War, 7 Secret, The, 165, 166 Sewell, Vernon, 13 Shaw, Harold, 75, 173 Sir Douglas Haig’s ‘The Great Push’: Battle of the Somme, 27 Smither, Roger, 7, 160–9 Somme, The (1927), 113, 179 South (1919), 88 Speed, Lancelot, 168 Spielberg, Steven, 10 Spufford, Francis, 89 Stamford, Lord, 147 Stannard, Eliot, 43, 44, 46, 82, 177 Stevenson, Frances, 34, 35 Stoll Picture Production, 118, 121 Summers, Walter, 11, 79–92, 95, 105, 111–17, 140, 177 Suspense (1930), 115, 116, 140 Taylor, Alma, 7 Taylor, Philip, 160

Index

Thiepval Monument,138 39 Steps, The (novel, 1915), 139 Thomas, Jameson, 12 Thornton, F. Martin, 96 Those Common People (play), 106 Three Live Ghosts (1922), 173 Thurston, Temple, 7 Topical Budget (journal), 163, 164 Topical Budget (films), 177 Trafalgar, Bicentenary of, 2005, 79 Trinder, Tommy, 84 Trilby (1914), 75 Tucker, George Loane, 72, 79, 96 Turvey, Gerry, 5, 39–48 U-571 (2000), 10 Ucicky, Gustav, 13 Unknown Soldier, 144 Unknown Soldier, The (1926), 10, 99–100 Unknown Warrior 100, 148 Urban, Charles, 24 Variety, 127 Vibart, Henry, 176 Victor, Henry, 118, 126 Victory Parade (1919), 151 Vidor, King, 10, 99 Visit of HRH the Prince of Wales to Ebbw Vale (1918), 163 Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD), 46 Von Clausewitz, Carl, 87 Von Spee, Maximillian, 83, 84

197

War Office, 3, 8, 22, 26, 31, 145, 171 War Graves Commission, 143, 145 War Memorial Committee, 153 Warner Brothers, 179 Way to His Heart, The (1942), 166 Weine, Robert, 137 Weir, Peter, 184 Weist, R., 55 Wellman, William, 14 Westminster Abbey, 144, 148 Weston, Charles, 39, 173 Wtherell, M. A., 179 Whale, James, 84, 128, 140 White, Chrissie, 7 Whitehall, 144 Whisky Galore (1948), 84 The White Feather (1914), 42 Wilcox, Herbert, 82, 97 Williams, Michael, 9, 94, 118–33 Wings (1927), 127 Winky, 173 Winter, Jay, 94 Woman to Woman (1923), 11 Woman’s Portion, The (1918), 175 Wood, Edward, 105–6 Woolfe, H. Bruce, 99, 105, 113 Wonderful Story, The (1924), 95, 96, 97–9 Wylie, I. A. R., 7 Ypres (1925), 95, 105, 113, 114, 116 Zeebrugge (1924), 99, 105, 113

British Silent Cinema and the Great War

Cinema and the Great War (Cinema and Society)

British Science Fiction Cinema (British Popular Cinema)

British Horror Cinema (British Popular Cinema)

British Crime Cinema (British Popular Cinema)

British Crime Cinema (British Popular Cinema)

Silent War

THE SILENT WAR

The Silent War

The Silent War

British Horror Cinema

The Silent Cinema in Song, 1896- 1929

Blackstone and the Great War

British National Cinema (National Cinemas)

British National Cinema (National Cinemas)

British Aeroplanes Before the Great War (Schiffer Aviation History)

The Great War: Breakthroughs

The Great Boer War

The Great Coalfield War

Great British Cheeses

The Great War: Breakthroughs

The Great War: Breakthroughs

The Great War: Breakthroughs

The great lobster war

The Great War Syndicate

British Empire and the Second World War

Femininity in the Frame: Women and 1950s British Popular Cinema (Cinema and Society)

Beauty and the Beast: Italianness in British Cinema

British at War

British at War

Great Britain and the American Civil War

British Silent Cinema and the Great War

Cinema and the Great War (Cinema and Society)

British Science Fiction Cinema (British Popular Cinema)

British Horror Cinema (British Popular Cinema)

British Crime Cinema (British Popular Cinema)

British Crime Cinema (British Popular Cinema)

Silent War

THE SILENT WAR

The Silent War

The Silent War

British Horror Cinema

The Silent Cinema in Song, 1896- 1929

Blackstone and the Great War

British National Cinema (National Cinemas)

British National Cinema (National Cinemas)

British Aeroplanes Before the Great War (Schiffer Aviation History)

The Great War: Breakthroughs

The Great Boer War

The Great Coalfield War

Great British Cheeses

The Great War: Breakthroughs

The Great War: Breakthroughs

The Great War: Breakthroughs

The great lobster war

The Great War Syndicate

British Empire and the Second World War

Femininity in the Frame: Women and 1950s British Popular Cinema (Cinema and Society)

Beauty and the Beast: Italianness in British Cinema

British at War

British at War

Great Britain and the American Civil War

Recommend Documents