The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Before Hollywood was more than orange groves, British film makers were developing comedies, chase sequences, jump-cuts and historical epics.101 Tragically, of the thousands of films made, only a few hundred survive, preserved by the British Film Institute. There was a movie world before Hollywood, but it is mostly a lost one. Britain’s first film-only picture theatre, the Balham Palace, opened in 1907 and the first purpose-built picture house, in Colne, Lancashire, let in customers the following year. They were quickly followed by Olympias, Bijous, Picturedromes and Palaceadiums around the country, initially small but soon growing larger and offering two sittings a night of a mix of long and short films, usually a couple of hours in total. By 1913 music-hall stars like Marie Lloyd, Albert Chevalier and George Robey were appearing on screen.

  A year later, just before the outbreak of war, the British got their first chance to see an even bigger star. He too had emerged from music hall and variety theatre. As a child actor and teenage stage comedian, he had watched Marie Lloyd prepare herself behind the wings at the Tivoli theatre in London’s Strand, had endured a hail of orange peel and coins when one of his acts bombed and had tramped the provincial towns of England in a clog-dancing show. His mother had been a ‘soubrette’, a stage singer. When she finally lost her voice, she was booed off the stage and her young son was pushed on to take her place; he recited a poem, mimicked her cracked singing and was showered with money. His father had been a well-known variety-hall baritone who lived on raw eggs and port wine, deserted his family early on and drank himself to death in his thirties. The boy’s early life was so grim it rivals the early years of Charles Dickens. Living in Lambeth with his mother and elder brother, he had often gone hungry. When the family ran completely out of food they had been forced to endure the squalid humiliation of the workhouse; then the two boys had been sent to Hanwell School for Orphans and Destitute Children, a bleak place of whippings and bullying. His mother suffered increasingly distressing bouts of insanity and was taken into lunatic asylums, where she was separated from her younger son while she was given brutal cold-water treatments and long spells in a padded cell. Often her boy had to live on his wits on the streets without any adult supervision or company, sleeping out by braziers and befriending tramps and destitute workmen to beg food.

  By astonishing perseverance and luck, he won some child-actor roles and then joined his brother in an unusual troupe of variety artists, the south London ‘fun factory’ of Fred Karno. And the structure of early Chaplin films – we are talking, of course, about Charlie Chaplin – owes a lot to the hugely popular sketches of Karno’s troupes of actors, with slapstick, sentimentality and mime. Karno himself had been a famous acrobat and clown and drove his actors very hard, with frantic rehearsal schedules. If he didn’t like a performance he would stand in the wings and blow raspberries. Vaudeville criss-crossed the Atlantic, and Chaplin was finally spotted by the nascent American film industry during his second tour with a Karno troupe during 1910–12. His first film, Making a Living, was released in 1914 and the contract stipulated that he had to appear in three films – every week. In fact, in that year he made a mere thirty-five films. With no idea of the true significance of movies, Chaplin thought they would be just a good way to boost his image in variety. But by this stage even the British were going to films in their millions. By 1914, when Making a Living (by no means a masterpiece) was on show across the country, it is reckoned that up to 4,500 cinemas had opened. Some 75,000 people were working in Britain in the new industry, yet the anarchic Chaplin style was not what the fustier British film-makers thought their audiences wanted. Had he stayed behind, Charlie Chaplin would today be a name known only to enthusiasts. Or else, like so many of his age, he would have joined up in 1914 and been killed or maimed during the four years that followed.

  And it was the Great War that boosted the film industry. There were films showing the King visiting troops, British soldiers in training, the fleet and military victories in the Middle East, along with some anti-German propaganda films, recruiting films and even a few documentary-style films from the front. This started to make the medium respectable and patriotic: film magazines of the time are full of earnest protestations about the young industry doing its bit. The breakthrough film was made by a plucky young director called Geoffrey Malins, whose 1916 Battle of the Somme was made partly on location and showed identifiable regiments – Bedfords, Suffolks, Gordon Highlanders – and dead bodies, wounded men and real fighting. The next year he followed it up with a film showing British tanks advancing. Both probably included faked material shot far from the action, but they astonished audiences at home and delighted both the King and Lloyd George, who urged everyone to see The Somme. The newspapers agreed. It was booked in 2,000 venues in the first two months but many people wanted to be distracted and entertained, and recoiled from war films. In Hammersmith, west London, one cinema hall had a poster reading: ‘WE ARE NOT SHOWING THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME. THIS IS A PLACE OF AMUSEMENT, NOT A CHAMBER OF HORRORS’.102

  Britain had lost Chaplin. But there were others, and they do not deserve to be forgotten. George Pearson was one. At about the same time as D. H. Lawrence gave up school teaching to write novels, Pearson, who looked rather like Lawrence, with hooded eyes and a full moustache, gave up teaching to devote himself to writing and making films – a crazy gamble. After working for tiny companies he became head of Gaumont’s new British operation and in 1915 was asked to come up with a series of thrillers. He invented a daring adventurer, wreaking revenge on enemies who thought him dead, called Ultus. Played by an Australian actor called Aurele Sydney, described as ‘a real he-man type’, Ultus became a hugely popular wartime cult. First discovered left to die by a traitorous accomplice in the desert, Ultus the avenger returns to punish the traitor. He has been compared to an early version of Batman or Zorro, the avenger with a conscience. These films were chase-and-mystery plots but made with a subtle touch that was rare in early British cinema and won Pearson admirers ever afterwards. His work at new studios in Shepherd’s Bush included experimenting with a more mobile camera, cleverer lighting and more realistic sets – which were needed because Sydney was such a he-man that when he came through a door and closed it either the handle or the door tended to come away in his hand.

  Pearson’s great post-war discovery was Betty Balfour, probably the most popular home-grown British film actor of the twenties, but he wanted film to do more. Now with his own company, he offered alternative happy and unhappy endings to the same film (Love, Life and Laughter of 1923) and tried to show how the war had affected a group of working-class people in the only vaguely plotted Reveille of the following year. In his way he was as idealistic as Lawrence, if more sentimental, and dreamed of films liberated from story-lines and built instead ‘emotion by emotion’. He made more experimental films, including in 1926 The Little People, on the theme of everyone being puppets, pulled by invisible strings, and set among the puppeteers of Milan. It was a popular failure. By then the ‘talkies’ were coming and, anyway, people wanted plot. Pearson would continue making films almost all his life, though reduced to shorter and documentary work. Like most of the rest of the industry in Britain, he had failed to realize that the world of film would depend on simple, fast stories and lots of laughs.

  By the close of the Great War British film production was mostly scattered round London and the Home Counties, in steel sheds with large windows for lighting and piles of painted stage-set scenery. There was Barker Motion Photography at Ealing, the London Film Company studios at Twickenham, Master Films at Esher, the British and Colonial Kinematograph Company at Walthamstow, Broadwest, also at Walthamstow, Hepworth at Walton-on-Thames, plus the French-owned incomers Pathé and Gaumont. The twenties saw a flurry of mergers, new companies starting and old ones closing, and the industry growing fast. Small cinemas were steadily replaced by much bigger ones, the lavishly decorated dream palaces of cinema’s golden age. Art-nouveau ‘picture houses’ and ‘cinematographic theatr
es’ closed and sleek, marbled Gaumont Palaces took their place, with the latest Otis lifts, sweeping staircases and raised seating. The newspapers now took films semi-seriously, and there were the first signs of interest in world cinema – Wells, Keynes, Shaw, Ivor Novello and John Gielgud were among the early members of the Film Society, founded in 1925 to raise its intellectual tone.

  But if the war had made film more respectable, it had also starved the British film industry of capital. British films were made for a fraction – between a quarter and a tenth – of what American films cost, and British film actors earned paltry wages by Hollywood standards. Despite this, in the final years of the silent movies, British film-makers produced a slew of gripping, dramatic and highly imaginative films which are only now beginning to be rediscovered. The arrival of Hollywood stars such as Mary Pickford and Tallulah Bankhead caused massive press excitement. Hollywood quickly came to dominate. It was the bigger, brighter, brasher capital of cultural revolution just as surely as Moscow wanted to be the centre of political revolution. British film-makers protested about the endless supply of fast-moving American movies and particularly the Chaplin comedies. Londoner he might have been but now he was a symbol of American domination, the living Coca-Cola bottle of his day. British politicians and imperial prime ministers became increasingly worried that the Empire was being edged out. In 1927 a quota system was introduced: 7.5 per cent of films shown in British and imperial cinemas had to be empire-made, rising to 20 per cent by 1935. It was naked protectionism and it worked, at least in increasing the number of British films made. They included ripping imperial yarns and homely comedies which remained popular. But, swamped by the sheer volume of material from America, British film-making was always on the back foot.

  The achievement of British film, particularly before the arrival of talkies in 1929, has been written out of the national story. It is a great pity so few modern Britons have seen or heard of the stars and stories that delighted their ancestors. Yet there is no getting away from the fact that British film culture was a little too deferential and backward looking compared with the surging energy of American film in its heyday. The tyranny of Respectable and Educated Opinion meant too many costume dramas: perhaps the fact that even the great film-maker Michael Balcon chose to call his company ‘Gainsborough’ says it all. The public wanted fun, cheerful escapism, thrills and chases – they wanted Ultus, and above all Chaplin. There would be some excellent British films to come, notably from a plump young Londoner called Alfred Hitchcock. But in film, as in factory techniques, music and celebrity culture, the Americanized world was already emerging from the plains and orange groves.

  Anti-Modern

  How modern did the British really want to be? To find where the heart lies, look at the home. Modernism was the dominant visual idea of the age, but you do not find it in the suburbs of Britain. Modernism is easy to recognize, harder to define. We know what it looks like – in buildings, it means sharp, harsh lines and angles, lots of white paint, metallic furniture, only the simplest brick decoration. But the spirit behind the buildings is where we need to start, because it influenced how people behaved, how they thought about their bodies, and how they saw the world. In essence, it was a sweep-clean movement. Away with the complication, the pomposity, the class divisions and the gloomy grandeur of the pre-war world – away with the discredited heaviness of the defeated Kaiser’s Germany, the refined pleasures of the discredited Czar’s Russia and the destroyed Habsburg Empire. In the place of stuffy rooms, heavy clothes and formality, let there be a new world of light, airy buildings, simple fashions – above all, youth and health. Modernism could take strongly political forms. The Italian futurists, celebrating speed and vigour, were early supporters of Mussolini while in Soviet Russia modernist architects and photographers would try to create a new aesthetic, until Stalin, whose tastes were far more traditional, put paid to them. In Holland and Austria modernism was the clean-limbed expression of social democracy. In Germany itself the Weimar Republic had a modernist flavour – the Bauhaus movement, with its stark and simple factories, its mass-produced, airy workers’ apartment blocks, suggested a new world. To begin with the Nazis appropriated some of the feel of modernism, from the clean lines of the Volkswagen car and the stark simplicity of the Autobahns, to the Mies van der Rohe plans for vast glass, granite and marble monuments to the new regime. Then, like Stalin, Hitler made plain his preference for stodgy dictator-romanticism, and the modernists had to flee.

  Many ended up in Britain, and the look of the country in the late twenties and early thirties was certainly affected by them. Berthold Lubetkin from Georgia had been an early enthusiast for the Russian Revolution; when he arrived in London in 1931 and set up his architectural practice Tecton, he gave the capital the famous Penguin Pool at London Zoo and those radical concrete-and-glass apartments known as Highpoint One and Highpoint Two, then the equally modernist Finsbury Health Centre. One of the other great buildings of the thirties is the De La Warr Seaside Pavilion at Bexhill in Sussex, a bright white and glass combination of theatre, bars, restaurant, café, sun terraces and bandstand that breathes optimism and ozone: it was designed by Erich Mendelsohn, who had fled from the Nazis, and by Serge Chermayeff. Other modernists were home-grown, such as Harry Beck, a young draughtsman working for the signalling department of London Transport, who in 1931 came up with the idea for the Underground map – a simple breakthrough which has been copied around the world and was voted Britain’s second-favourite design of the twentieth century (after Concorde). Indeed, London Transport, under the leadership of Frank Pick, a nonconformist and teetotal idealist, became the flag-bearer for modernism in Britain. Stations like Arnos Grove, designed by Charles Holden, are directly influenced by Swedish and Dutch examples. The Scottish calligrapher Edward Johnston provided the clean and distinctive platform logos still used today.

  Modernism at its best was meant to make the world brighter, lighter and healthier. Yet it failed to answer some strong instinct in the British – the love of privacy in a crowded island, a quiet suspicion that the past for all its faults might perhaps have been a nicer country. For the truly characteristic buildings of the period were not white or cubist but boxy, cosy, semi-detached bungalows stretched out on the new arterial roads. We know them because they are all around us, these homes with tiled roofs, brick decoration, Hobbit-friendly porches, gently curved front windows, walls or hedges at the front, crazy-paving paths, all the same and all subtly different. Hydrangea homes; homes fit for people who know their place; homes with potting sheds for pottering in. ‘Metro-land’ was the name invented before the Great War for that chunk of land north of London where the Metropolitan Railway extended and bought thousands of acres of land for speculative building. It became shorthand for the new suburbs everywhere, places connected to city centres but allowing the middle classes gardens, privacy, comparative quietness – not the countryside, but the sound of songbirds.

  The most thought-through versions of this dream were the two pioneer garden cities, first Letchworth and then Welwyn. They were the creation of a cluster of idealists, led by an admirer of Ruskin and the back-to-nature reformers of Victorian Britain called Ebenezer Howard. His main job had been the gloomily repetitive one of parliamentary shorthand writer (he was responsible for several innovations in typewriting), but he had dreams of a better way of living, not just for himself but for every town dweller. He thought new towns must be built, with decent spaces between the houses, trees, avenues and the industrial zones far enough away to avoid pollution, while the nearby countryside would be used to provide food. It was, in sum, a vision of sustainable urban living which still seems radical and appropriate in the twenty-first century. Howard’s vision was not about pretty housing estates but about a reshaping of how and where we live. With an energetic architect called Raymond Unwin, who had worked with Seebohm Rowntree, Howard’s first garden city at Letchworth began to take shape in 1904. Then, in the closing months of the war, the now-aged
Ebenezer spotted a second site at the village of Welwyn, north of London, and raised cash to buy a shooting estate from its debt-laden owner. There, from 1921, Welwyn Garden City began to appear: among its backers was Harmsworth’s Daily Mail, which had been sponsoring its Ideal Home Exhibition since 1908 and offered to build some cottages free of charge. There was even a Dailymail Village, though it is now dully called Meadow Green.

  The garden-city movement did not transform Britain, as Ebenezer Howard, sitting in his parliamentary cubicle, had once hoped. It did influence garden suburbs all over the country, however, and had a big impact on the post-1945 new-town designers. More to the immediate point, Howard and his friends were the transmission system through which ideals about semi-rural or cottagey living were passed from high-minded Victorian dreamers to the rampant speculative builders of the inter-war period who covered this country with semis. Howard’s architect follower, Unwin, was a member of the 1917 select committee of MPs which drew up new standards for public housing, or ‘cottages’ for the outer suburbs: the first wave of homes for heroes that Lloyd George had spoken of. And its recommendations were turned into a pattern book of housing designs in the Housing Manual of 1919, by the Ministry of Health. These, in turn, would be borrowed and used by the private speculative builders whose work dominates much of Britain today. The designs came not from architects but from guides almost as simple as those you would need to assemble a model aircraft kit or a complicated set of flat-pack furniture. It was hardly what Ruskin or William Morris would have expected to leave as their heritage.