Eventually, the naval footage was edited together with film taken at Aldershot that showed a group of recruits being trained for the army, a sequence showing Royal Flying Corps aircraft practice-bombing (and missing) a farmhouse on Salisbury Plain, and the return of a photo reconnaissance aircraft. To these were added at the last minute shots of women war workers in a Vickers factory, as it was thought this would impress audiences abroad as to the extent to which Britain was already mobilised for war. The film, which originally ran for more than three hours with parts of the newly shot material in colour, was premiered on 29 December 1915 at the Empire, Leicester Square. Foreign ambassadors, members of the diplomatic corps, MPs and members of the House of Lords, senior representatives of the armed services and many other dignitaries were present. Balfour himself came on to the stage before the screening to introduce and commend the film as an ‘entertainment [that] is something more than an entertainment’. The film was shown with a specially prepared musical accompaniment of marches, airs and songs selected to match each scene, and it ended with the national anthem. The audience was apparently thrilled by the climax of the film, when the battleship fired its broadside of salvoes and flashes of orange flame and black smoke lipped out of the huge gun barrels.9
Britain Prepared is rather quaint by later standards.10 It primarily presents scenes of the navy, with shots of the army and air force added as an afterthought. But the film makes no claims as to the superiority of British weapons or the invincibility of the armed services. Nor does it pretend that any of the shots are of actual fighting; it simply shows the army and the navy preparing for war. In this sense the film uses no fakes and is totally honest, in line with Masterman’s view of what propaganda should be.
Indeed, Masterman was delighted with the film and wrote, just after Bulgaria had joined the war on the German side, ‘If we had only had permission to arrange this six or seven months ago I believe we could have shown places like Bulgaria pictures of the fleet and they would never have gone over to the enemy.’11 The film was shown all over Britain and throughout the world. Audiences in Britain were especially enthralled with the scenes of the Royal Navy’s massive warships, which were often cheered and applauded as they appeared on the screen. In Europe too the film went down very well. The French were impressed by the scenes of the vast munitions in production, and even a German newspaper reporter who saw the film in neutral Switzerland wrote, ‘We must admit, a more clever advertisement could hardly be made by the English Ministry of War for its Army and Fleet and its war services in general.’12
In the United States, however, the film failed to excite audiences. In part this was down to German sympathies among cinema owners and film distributors who did not want to show it. Urban, who had taken the film to America himself, struggled hard to find distributors. This he justified to Wellington House by saying that for many Americans the film was ‘too classy’, although some merely thought it was too bland and uninteresting, and lacked punch. ‘If it showed troopers being blown to pieces, it would go all right’ was one typical comment.13 At its New York opening at the Lyceum Theatre on 29 May 1916 there was nearly an incident. The film included shots of George V reviewing soldiers, captioned as Irish, on their way to relieve others at the front. It was only a few weeks since the Easter Rising in Ireland and, with an audience that had great sympathy for the Irish cause, Urban feared the worst. However, to his delight, there was spontaneous cheering as the scenes were shown, and when the orchestra struck up ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ a famous opera singer led the whole audience in singing along. Eventually, the film was shown to audiences in all the major cities of the east coast. One of those who saw it in Washington was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, young Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was impressed, and believed it demonstrated the need for the American government to begin preparations in case it found itself in the war before long.14
Meanwhile, footage sent back by the two cameramen on the Western Front was edited into occasional short films seven or eight minutes in length. But none had the impact of a major compilation like Britain Prepared. Furthermore, the endless sparring between the War Office and the cinema trade continued. The public officials from the War Office found the cinema men grasping and focused on profit. The trade representatives still thought the army was being unhelpful and restrictive, and had failed to realise the full potential that film had to offer.
The cameramen were officially a part of GHQ under Brigadier Charteris, whose intelligence responsibilities also covered the press. Their day-to-day care was in the hands of Captain Faunthorpe, who would give them instructions each morning as to where to film and what of interest was happening. With the film cameramen there sometimes went a stills photographer whose photos would be released to the press.15 They were given an honorary rank and dressed as officers, wearing the green armbands of the Press Corps rather than unit badges. Filming was limited by the parameters of how the cameramen worked and what their cameras were capable of. Film cameras of the day were heavy and cumbersome, and were hand-cranked rather than motorised. An experienced cameraman could crank at exactly two complete turns per second, which would pull sixteen frames through the camera gate for exposure, and as film was usually projected at exactly this speed it made for a smooth and precise moving sequence. However, as most projectors were still hand cranked as well, the process was far from an exact science.16
The heavy hand-cranked cameras had to be mounted on large wooden tripods to provide stability. It was possible to move the camera only by turning or panning it sideways, or tilting it slightly up and down. This involved cranking the pan or tilt handle in the opposite direction with the left hand at the same time as cranking the camera with the right. Although this sounds complex, an experienced cameraman could do it quite smoothly even under shellfire. The final problem was the result of the standard 50mm lens used on the Western Front. This is the lens most commonly carried by photographers and it made for a good wide shot and a fine panorama, but it was not much good at detail or on close-ups in the battle zone. The army did not allow the use of longer, telephoto lenses in case sensitive detail was picked up, and the zoom lens had not then been invented. So most shots were either static wide shots or slow panoramas. The film itself was slow and the lenses usually operated at an aperture of about f 3.5, so filming was possible only in good light and never at dusk or in the dark. A cameraman could usually carry with him only 1200 feet of film stock, enough for about fifteen minutes of filming, although this was usually quite sufficient for most days’ work.17
The weight of all this equipment was more than 100 lb, and so the cameramen were reliant upon GHQ to provide transport to the point at which they could set up the camera and start filming. It was easy to set up and shoot film of troops moving up to the front or of artillery pieces firing, and such sequences contained their own movement; easy too to film groups of soldiers resting behind the lines, or groups of prisoners, or the wounded being transported. However, walking up through the reserve trenches to the front line carrying a camera and tripod would be slow and arduous. Moreover, a cameramen filming near the front trenches would not only be in immense danger, risking almost instant death if he showed himself above the trench parapet, but would also be unpopular with the troops for blocking the trench. So, in practice, there were severe restrictions on what it was possible to film. In today’s era of lightweight, hand-carried, highly portable cameras, it’s difficult to imagine the challenges facing First World War cameramen. But it is essential to do so in order to understand their output.
Of the two cameramen who had gone to the Western Front in November 1915, Teddy Tong was soon invalided out with influenza, leaving only Geoffrey Malins to film in the first months of 1916. Malins, then aged twenty-nine, was forceful and ambitious. Born in Hastings, he had worked as an assistant at a photographer’s portrait studio in Weymouth. The demand for formal portraits had declined with the spread of portable box brownie cameras, so Malins moved into the growing c
inema industry instead. In 1910 he got a job as principal cameraman for a south London production company, Clarendon Films of Croydon, for whom he shot a run of highly successful melodramas. But, itching for action, in August 1914 he transferred to the Gaumont film company and became a cameraman for their twice-weekly Graphic newsreel, even though to transfer to news filming was almost certainly a step down for the equivalent of a feature film cameraman. Malins filmed for a few months with the Belgian army, the only military force that allowed cameramen near the front, and then went back to London to work for Gaumont Graphic. It was thanks to his experience with the Belgians that he was selected to go to the front as one of the first two official British cameramen. In the deal negotiated between Brooke Wilkinson and the War Office, the cinema trade paid Malins £1 per day, but he had to live in army accommodation and on military rations in France.
The seven-to-eight-minute films into which for several months his footage was edited by what was now called the Topical Film Committee were made up of little more than a few scenes shot near the front, and had titles like Ypres – The Shell Shattered City in Flanders, The Destruction of a German Blockhouse by 9.2 Howitzer, HRH The Prince of Wales with the Guards and In Action with our Canadian Troops. Although the close supervision of Captain Faunthorpe, who acted as his ‘minder’, could be frustrating, a rapport built up between the two men, and Faunthorpe paid tribute to Malins in a report to the War Office, saying that he was often ‘constantly under fire’ when filming and that shells sometimes landed within twenty yards, ‘ploughing up the ground almost at their feet and showering missiles round the camera’.18 Malins showed great ingenuity on one occasion, rigging a camera in a BE2c aeroplane and filming the trenches from the air. And he invented a variety of imaginative ways of filming near the front under canvas sheets and through mock sandbags. Back in Britain the reviews of the films edited from his material were very favourable.
In June 1916, with the approach of General Haig’s Big Push along the Somme, GHQ decided to ask for a second film cameraman to come out to France in order to record what they hoped would be an historic victory. John Benjamin McDowell, thirty-eight-year-old head of the British and Colonial Film Company, volunteered for the role. In the last week of June, Malins started filming troops moving up towards the front and shot scenes of the heavy artillery barrage that preceded the launch of Battle of the Somme. McDowell arrived in France a couple of days later to join him. On 1 July, the bloody and catastrophic first day of the battle, Malins was allocated to film with the 29th Division in the vicinity of Beaumont Hamel, where the attack proved to be a disaster; McDowell was sent to film alongside the 7th Division further south near Mametz where it was relatively successful. Malins filmed a memorable sequence of Lancashire Fusiliers in a sunken road in no man’s land waiting for the order to advance. The men’s faces are lined with anxiety and tension, capturing a rare glimpse of what it must have felt like just before going over the top.
A few minutes later, at 7.20, Malins prepared to film a huge mine set to go off at the Hawthorn Redoubt. Malins later gave an account of the incident in his book How I Filmed the War. Sadly, the book is largely unrealistic; Malins presents himself in it like the hero of a trashy novel, rushing hither and thither as explosions rage around him, but always miraculously pulling through. By contrast, his description of filming the mine explosion is totally believable. He set up his camera and tripod in the midst of a group of engineers who would rush into the crater once the mine had gone off, describing the next few moments as follows:
Time: 7.19. My hand grasped the handle of the camera … Another thirty seconds passed. I started turning the handle of the camera, two revolutions per second, no more, no less … I fixed my eyes on the Redoubt. Any second now. Surely it was time. It seemed to me as if I had been turning for hours. Surely it had not misfired... I looked at my exposure dial. I had used over a thousand feet. The horrible thought flashed through my mind that my film might run out before the mine blew. Would it go up before I had time to reload? … I had to keep on. Then it happened. The ground where I stood gave a mighty convulsion. It rocked and swayed. I gripped hold of my tripod to steady myself. Then, for all the world like a gigantic sponge, the earth rose in the air to the height of hundreds of feet... From the moment the mine went up my feelings changed. The crisis was over and from that second I was cold, cool and calculating. I looked upon all that followed from the purely pictorial point of view.19
Many combat cameramen in the next hundred years would experience similar tensions: waiting, anxiety about running out of stock, and then, blocking out everything else, total concentration on the job to be done.
Malins and McDowell spent a week filming events the length of the battlefield. According to Malins, a shell landed so close to him at one point that it ripped his tripod in half and threw him backwards. Both cameramen filmed the arrival and treatment of the wounded at Casualty Clearing Stations. They filmed prisoners being brought in and reinforcements marching up to the front. Whenever men saw Malins with his camera and tripod, they asked to be in the picture and waved at the camera. He and McDowell also filmed in German trenches captured on the southern flank of the offensive.
There was one problem, however. The critical moment of a First World War infantry assault came at zero hour, when the officers blew their whistles and led the men Over the top’, climbing out of their trenches to advance across no man’s land. John Buchan wrote at the time of the Somme, ‘The crossing of the parapet is the supreme moment in modern war. The troops are outside defences, moving across the open to investigate the unknown. It is the culmination of months of training for officers and men, and the least sensitive feels the drama.’20 It had proved impossible to film such a scene in the confined space of the front trench with the cumbersome film cameras available, and it would have been suicidal for a cameraman to get up before or behind the troops as they clambered forward. However, Malins later said that he was very aware of the need to provide ‘thrills’ in the footage he shot, material that people ‘had never seen before, and had never dreamed possible’, and at the War Office there was no doubt the expectation that this central moment should be recorded.21 So Malins went to a trench mortar battery training school in the rear at Rollencourt, where a set of trenches had been laid out quite authentically. There he set up his camera behind a practice trench and filmed a squad of men going over the top.22 Malins’ previous experience in shooting dramas at Clarendon Films clearly came into play here. He laid down a smoke screen in the barbed wire in front of the trench into which the men were to advance. Not satisfied with this, he asked two men to fall as though shot as they climbed out of the trench, and directed two more to fall as they advanced into the smoke. It looked realistic. But he had faked the whole scene.23
On 10 July, Malins and McDowell returned to London with several hours of footage. When it was screened for members of the Topical Committee for War Films (as it was now called) there was general agreement that it contained some outstanding material. William Jury, the chair of the committee, argued that because of the strength of the images and the importance of the continuing battle in France, they should not edit the footage into a series of short films but instead turn it into one long, feature-length documentary. One of the first exhibitors of film in Britain, Jury ran one of the country’s major distribution companies, Jury’s Imperial Pictures. He had a good sense of what the public would want and persuaded the rest of the committee and the War Office to agree to produce and distribute a single feature-length film on the Battle of the Somme. After the army censor in London had viewed the footage, Jury supervised the editing of the film, which took place quickly over two weeks.
The resultant film is structured chronologically and very simply, showing three phases of the battle. First there are the preparations, the build-up of supplies, the artillery bombardment, and endless columns of men marching to the front. Second comes a short sequence depicting the launch of the attack. Finally, the third phase depicts
the aftermath, in which long lines of the wounded and prisoners are brought back and bodies are seen scattered across the battlefield. The film ends by showing preparations for the next attack. Once inter-titles had been written and shot to provide a basic guide to the action, the edited film was taken back to GHQ in France and shown again to the high command, who approved it for public screening.
By early August the film was complete. It ran for one hour and seventeen minutes, and the main trade magazine, The Bioscope, published a list of music recommended for playing as an accompaniment to each scene.24 David Lloyd George, who had recently become Secretary of State for War, wrote a short introduction, recommending that every cinema manager should read it before the film was screened. He called the film ‘an epic of self-sacrifice and gallantry’ and ‘the most important and imposing picture of the war that our staff has yet procured’.25 While the battle continued to rage in France, and barely six weeks after the worst day in the history of Britain’s armed forces, the documentary feature had its trade preview on 10 August at the Scala cinema in London’s West End. Simply titled The Battle of the Somme, not only was it one of the first, but as it proved, the most successful official propaganda film ever produced in Britain.26
Crowds flocked to see the film. Queues formed outside cinemas, and at first more people were turned away than managed to buy tickets. By the end of the first week more than one million people had seen it in the thirty-four cinemas screening it in London alone. Across the country it was equally popular. In the industrial cities of the north, cinemas were packed for continuous screenings from morning to late evening. In Glasgow, one cinema manager arranged an extra screening, free for wounded servicemen at home on leave. Other films that had been booked were cancelled to make space for it. Everywhere it broke box office records. And the press response was equally positive. The Evening News wrote that The Battle of the Somme was ‘the greatest moving picture in the world’ and compared it favourably to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.27 The Star wrote that ‘Somebody in the War Office or at GHQ has at last... grasped the power of the moving picture to carry the war on to British soil.’28 The Manchester Guardian wrote that it was ‘the real thing at last’. The trade press was even more ecstatic. Kine Weekly claimed it was ‘the most wonderful battle picture that has ever been taken’, and The Cinema affirmed that ‘There is no make believe. This is the real thing.’29
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