The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  Ian Dalrymple, who was in charge when the GPO Film Unit became the Crown Film Unit, took a very different view. He thought Jennings ‘the most modest man alive; he never by any chance sold himself at all’. But when shown Jennings’s work for Spring Offensive (1940), he was convinced that this director had ‘something special … to be used in a quite different way’. Whereas the ebullient Harry Watt was a vigorous director of action, Jennings had, and Dalrymple liked, that quality of ‘poetry’ which irked Grierson.5

  Humphrey Jennings and Harry Watt were jointly credited as directors of London Can Take It, commissioned by the MoI specifically for screening in the USA, though Watt remembered the whole unit being involved, with himself in charge as supervisory director. It was September. London was three weeks into severe Blitz. ‘Everybody was sent round looking for people just carrying on. We reconstructed quite a bit’ (this of course was unavoidable – spontaneous filming was so difficult, people had to be persuaded to act, or re-enact, ‘real life’ behaviour). They wanted a ‘bit of humour’ in it and ‘got the shot of the civil servant with the Anthony Eden Hat and the little attaché case and the umbrella getting a lift from the East End in a donkey cart going to Covent Garden. That was a fake, but it was true, you see … The famous last shot of a little Cockney working man lighting a fag was one of Humphrey Jennings’s touches of genius. He shot that.’6 Work on the film began about 26 September, and was finished by 11 October. The film was in the USA by 15 October. A version tactfully called Britain Can Take It, only half as long, was released in the UK as one of the five-minute films issued by the MoI to cinemas. The evidence is that the public at home liked it – the press, given its cue by Reynolds’s friend Christiansen, certainly extolled it.7

  Watt had gone to the MoI to ask for help in securing a commentator. The American division suggested Mary Walsh, who later married Hemingway. Watt hated women commentators and begged Bernstein to suggest an alternative. Bernstein put him on to Reynolds – ‘an enormous, easy-going, rather drunken character’ who, according to Watt, refused to come out of the underground restaurant at the Savoy during the night. He had never written a commentary before and Watt found this an advantage. Working with a cutting-copy of the film and Watt’s own treatment, he wrote ‘reams’ of ‘stuff’ and let the Crown Film Unit men cut and reject it as they wanted. His big Bronx voice, though, was a severe problem when it came to recording:

  He had never even broadcast on radio, so we stood him in front of the mike and told him to have a go. The first words were ‘I am speaking from London.’ Quent bellowed them out like a barker in a fair-ground! I said, ‘That’s great, Quent, great, but just take it down a bit, will you?’ He did it again, and still sounded like a master of ceremonies at a banquet, so we gave him a drink and got into a huddle in the sound booth … Then Ken Cameron, the sound man, had the flash of intuition that was to make Quentin Reynolds famous. He said, ‘Look, he’s a big bugger with an enormous belly. Let’s sit him down in an armchair, stick the microphone nearly down his throat, and let him whisper.’ We did this, and rumbling out of that belly came the famous deep Quentin growl, that was destined to be listened to throughout the Allied world.8

  Reynolds’s script was successfully published as a booklet in 1941. His foreword contained a frank admission that the film’s subject matter and objectives were determined by the MoI, and also the statement that he had refused payment for his work on the film, which had already been shown in ‘twelve thousand’ American cinemas. It is a sturdy piece of propaganda praising ‘the greatest civilian army ever to be assembled’ – the volunteers serving in Britain’s ARP – asking viewers if they detect ‘any signs of fear’ in the faces of ‘the very young and the very old’ sleeping in the shelters; praising Britain’s ‘surging spirit of courage the like of which the world has never seen’; stressing that after a night of Blitz, Londoners ‘manage to get to work on time – one way or another’. In Reynolds’s peroration he growls out, ‘I am a neutral reporter … I can assure you there is no panic, no fear, no despair in London Town … London can take it.’9

  It is hard to believe now that such blatantly propagandist assertions were ever accepted as the factual observations of a neutral. They are in piquant tension with the film directors’ sometimes witty, sometimes delicate images. But Jennings wrote to his wife that using Reynolds’s commentary had been ‘terrific luck’.10

  The film stands out among short propaganda efforts from British film studios early in the war for the clarity of its propaganda and the brilliance of its cutting (in which Stewart McAllister collaborated). Delighted, the MoI followed it up with another short film narrated by Reynolds and produced by Crown, Christmas Under Fire. Reynolds speaks to camera in this one, which deals with British difficulties in maintaining festive traditions: ‘This year England celebrates Christmas underground … The stable in Bethlehem was a shelter too.’ The nation is resolved that its children will not be cheated. Deep England is invoked as the film cuts between blitzed London and a rural village: ‘Today in England even the shepherds are in some kind of uniform.’ England, ‘unbeaten, unconquered, unafraid’, still holds the ‘Torch of Integrity’ given to her by ‘destiny’ as the King’s College, Cambridge, choristers sing, ‘Come Let Us Adore Him’. This is a deeply Christian nation.

  The films which Jennings directed alone with Stewart McAllister as editor were also propaganda, produced to meet the requirements of MoI policy. They were successful at the time with British and American audiences, so in MoI’s terms they were efficient propaganda. They may have owed some of their success to the fact that their artistic quality captivated people who were in a position to get them shown. Thus, Roger Manvell, who would be one of the best-known British authorities on cinema in the early post-war years, was an MoI film-officer, first, from 1940 to 1943, in south-west England, then, for the rest of the war, in the north-west. He organised over 25,000 showings and claimed that in most of these he had included films by Jennings. Two or three ‘shorts’ might be seen in a factory during a meal break, up to six in a longer programme for a more general audience in a public hall (for instance, a screening for a Women’s Institute). There were also special screenings, often on Sundays, in local cinemas.

  Manvell included Jennings’s material in ‘virtually all’ his ‘general screenings’ because of ‘the poetic and emotional lift they gave to the programmes as a whole. I do not exaggerate when I say that members of audiences … (especially during the earlier, more immediately alarming years) frequently wept as a result of Jennings’s direct appeal to the rich cultural heritage of Britain, going back … to Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, to Purcell and Handel.’ The only comparable effects, according to Manvell, were achieved by ‘the beautiful films of life in the English countryside made by Ralph Keene’.11 It is perhaps unfair that while Keene is forgotten, Jennings is still celebrated.

  Frank Humphrey Sinkler Jennings was born in 1907 in Walberswick, a fishing village in Suffolk. His father was an architect, his mother a talented painter who ran what we would now call a ‘boutique’ in the village, selling imported French pottery and textiles. The place had an appeal to artists, and when Jennings was a small boy, the great Glaswegian architect, designer and painter Charles Rennie Mackintosh lived there for a time. There is no record that Jennings noticed, on ‘Toshie’s’ characteristic progress from a taciturn drink in one village pub to an equally silent drink in the other, that remarkable man whose career, one of huge achievement followed by frustration, had something in common with his own.

  What Jennings did remember, in his own annus mirabilis, 1943, was the village’s history of ‘disaster – fire, flood, encroachments of the sea, poverty, oppression, decline, war and the military, destruction of common rights’. Another major artist whose work was fraught with enigma and ambivalence, Benjamin Britten, grew up and died in Aldeburgh, a nearby coastal village: in his Peter Grimes, first produced in 1945 just before the end of the war, this pacifist and homosexual projecte
d village people less than favourably, as persecutors of the non-conformist Grimes. But Jennings, at the height of a People’s War, conceived Walberswick folk as representatives of People in general:

  Unwritten the story of the people’s resistance, uncelebrated in word their struggle and labour. But the church towers from the past, the jetties and piers, the mills and lighthouses, the farms and cottages, the roads and the ridiculous railway – in whatever state they may be now – we must never forget that they were made and built and created and tended by the people – not by those powers for whom they were put up or whose names they bear or whose money allowed them to call them theirs – into the actual making they had little or no part – it was the people and the people alone who had the knowledge and strength and skill and love to fit the sails in the windmill, the thatch to the barn, the wings to the wooden angels, the flashing reflector to the lighthouse lamp.12

  His parents, being ‘progressives’, attached to folk art and guild socialism, sent him to the Perse School, Cambridge where the work of W. H. D. Rouse, the headmaster, had been praised by A. R. Orage in The New Age. Here, Jennings took part in and designed scenery for plays, and he carried this on when he proceeded to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he took a Double First in the recently set up English Tripos, and became part of a remarkable undergraduate milieu which combined rediscovery of good English things with an interest in new developments on the Continent, particularly in surrealism. (It was typical that Jennings saw Marx Brothers films as ‘surrealism for the millions’.)

  A postgraduate thesis on the poetry of Thomas Gray petered out as Jennings drifted into odd jobs and attempts to be a painter. Probably in mid-1934 he began to work with the GPO Film Unit. Early collaborations were with the Brazilian Cavalcanti, who had come to Grierson from the Parisian world of the young Buñuel, and the extraordinary New Zealand artist Len Lye, then experimenting with film animation. Jennings joined the organising committee of the famous International Surrealist Exhibition which shocked (or amused) Londoners in 1936 – other members were André Breton and the young Roland Penrose.

  Certain events towards the end of 1936 set Jennings and friends in the Film Unit and literary Bohemia talking about what became Mass-Observation. The burning down of that great Victorian inspiration the Crystal Palace intrigued the surrealist mind as much as the way in which the abdication crisis exposed the primitive, pre-rational character of British attachment to monarchy. The story of Mass-Observation’s founding has now been recited often: Jennings and his friend Charles Madge, a poet, by the sort of coincidence dear to surrealists, were brought into touch with Tom Harrisson, and the trio appealed in the columns of the New Statesman for volunteer ‘Observers’ to come forward to help them investigate the bases of mass consciousness through the study of such phenomena as ‘Shouts and gestures of motorists … The aspidistra cult … Bathroom behaviour … Distribution, diffusion and significance of the dirty joke’.13

  Jennings’s involvement in what seemed to many a jokey fad was later held against him by serious-minded people in the documentary film movement. Yet, while brief, it was almost absurdly serious-minded: Jennings’s main contribution to Mass-Observation was to edit, from a mass (or morass) of observations by individuals in London and throughout Britain, an account of May 12th 1937. the Coronation Day of George VI. The interest in relation to Jennings of this abortive (though fascinating) attempt to plumb the English psyche is that the book involved ‘cutting’ techniques analogous to those of cinema. Its failure is one of many pieces of evidence suggesting that Jennings, whose surrealist paintings are bare of lively interest and whose poems and essays veer between the naïve and the portentously opaque, needed, to fulfil his talents, a medium in which natural and human images were both ‘given’ and carefully selected, ‘trouvé’ and complexly organised for instant effect.

  While Mass-Observation developed into a serious (though ultimately unsuccessful) rival to the new British Institute of Public Opinion set up by Dr Gallup, and even the poet Madge swiftly gravitated towards ‘hard’, statistical methods of social investigation, Jennings soon lost interest. If we agree with Geoffrey Nowell Smith that Jennings had seen Mass-Observation as providing means of ‘democratising the discoveries of Surrealism and … representing popular subjectivity dialectically and in unromanticised form’, then work for the GPO Film Unit offered a better way forward.14

  Grierson’s contempt for his most brilliant recruit (as shown, for instance, in his notorious remark to a colleague, ‘Let’s go down and see Humphrey being nice to the common people’) is not without paradox. There was a political agenda rather like Mass-Observation’s underlying Grierson’s didactic view of film – as Dai Vaughan summarises it: ‘if only our social interconnectedness and our mutual dependencies could be made manifest, politics would take care of itself’.15 It is implicit in Night Mail that the labour of postal workers as seen in the film – taxing, skilful, co-ordinated – helps to hold society together, and explicit in Auden’s poem that letters link individual subjectivities which would otherwise be bereft, lonely. Jennings’s wartime films represent Britain as an island of linked subjectivities, ‘mutual dependencies’.

  His development coincided with the development of a distinctive and impressive British style in feature-film narrative which was heavily influenced by the pre-war work of Grierson and his Unit. Charles Barr, in a characteristically elegant discussion of this matter, cites Grierson, in 1930, imploring the brilliant young Alfred Hitchcock, who had directed at this time Blackmail and Murder, to ‘give us a film of the Potteries or of Manchester or of Middlesborough, with the personals in their proper place and the life of the community instead of a benighted lady at stake’. In the Second World War, Barr goes on, the life of the community was ‘at stake’, and the classic feature films of those years – In Which We Serve, Millions Like Us, San Demetrio London – subordinate individual desire and ambition to the team and the job, so that audience pleasure comes from seeing the maintenance of group effort. A ‘central and very moving motif’ in such movies – I have cited an instance from In Which We Serve – is the individual’s choking back of grief over the death of a loved one and resumption of teamwork towards victory.16

  Watt and Cavalcanti brought documentary and narrative together (and both moved into the mainstream film industry, with Ealing Studios, during the war). The result was a British version of ‘realism’ which can be distinguished from the ‘neo-realism’, presenting ideological and class conflict, which was emerging in Italy among left-wing film-makers even before allied invasion, and from the ‘socialist realism’ of the Soviet Union.

  The hope of a better world after the war was idealistically expressed in direct statements made in documentary films and feature films alike, in films about battle and in films about civilian life. And Priestley’s insistence that virtually all of Us, the People, could get on with the war best by shrugging off Them, the Old Gang of Conservative politicians and bureaucrats – matched by Orwell’s now famous assertion of 1941 that England was a ‘family with the wrong members in charge’ – implied that class conflict, as between management and workers, could be superseded, just as the conflict of both groups with owners would disappear in the new era of state-controlled, state-planned industrial development.

  In 1942–3 Jennings produced two ‘classic’ narrative feature films in Fires Were Started, and The Silent Village. But his famous ‘poetic’ documentaries of 1941 were works not of narrative, but of montage.

  Listen to Britain, in particular, involves across-the-board harmonisation – of modernism (in technique) with traditional values, and of ideological contradictions and regional differences in British culture. To quote Nowell Smith again, Jennings’s films express the idea of ‘an industrial nation, still attached both nostalgically and projectively to rural values; a nation divided regionally and by differences of class and culture; but also one capable of holding together its contradictions and divisions in the face of external threat’
. He instances that very famous cut ‘on a chord’ between the Jewish entertainer Bud Flanagan singing in a works canteen and the Jewish classical pianist Myra Hess playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto K453 in G Major before the Queen (and lots of ordinary people) in the National Gallery. This shows, he points out, how Jennings’s technique, unlike the rhetoric of Churchill, can present awareness of instability as well as suggesting how the nation holds together: ‘The union of popular and high culture and their possible divergence’ are ‘held in the balance, possibilities glimpsed rather than realities asserted’.17

  Jennings’s biggest pre-war film for Grierson’s Unit had been Spare Time (1939). Often, misleadingly, called his ‘Mass-Observation’ film, it presents the leisure activities of working-class people in three British industries: steel (Sheffield), cotton (Lancashire) and coal (south Wales). It anticipates Listen to Britain in its emphasis on music, much of it performed on screen, which dominates the soundtrack. The most famous sequence shows a ‘kazoo band’ in Lancashire: girls in a uniform which suggests a strange variant of industrial clothing march, with no audience, in a bare arena, playing their harsh, limited instruments. There is a version of ‘Rule, Britannia’; one of the girls is dressed as Britannia. Orthodox Griersonians were outraged by Jennings’s ‘condescending’ attitude towards working-class culture in this sequence. In fact, he was appalled by the ‘desolation’ and ‘human misery’ he found in Lancashire: ‘At Manchester there was a sort of thin wet sunlight which makes it look pathetic’, he wrote to his wife. But he went on, ‘It has a grim sort of fantasy. And a certain dignity of its own from being connected with certain events in history.’18