The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  ‘Fantasy’ – the truly bizarre kazoo band – and ‘history’ – signified by Britannia – intersect in one face seen in particular, at a point expressive of ‘dignity’, in a way peculiar to this director, perhaps the key to his success as mythologist. There is a term, ‘absorption’, used by art historians (about, say, figures in Chardin’s paintings) which is relevant to this face. A kazoo player with her cap at an angle identical to that of her instrument (both tilting on the right of her face) stares at the camera (at us) with the concentration (partly suggested by her strong eyebrows) of someone not looking ‘at us’ but inwardly preoccupied with some resource inside her which relates to the national essence, to ‘history’. Because ‘absorption’ is present to this effect in Spare Time, I cannot buy Dai Vaughan’s argument that this stylistic hallmark derives from Stewart McAllister’s influence in the cutting room.

  But I defer to Vaughan’s expert analysis (as a film editor himself) of how this effect might be achieved. We must remember that it was impossible at that time for a documentarist to capture people spontaneously on film in a scene of any complexity and significance. People had to be cajoled by the director into ‘acting themselves’. Now Vaughan:

  McAllister has used precisely the segments which most editors would have gone out of their way to avoid: those segments where the subjects demonstrate, albeit fleetingly, their awareness of the camera. And my own experience tells me that, a frame or two after he has left them, they will have succeeded in composing themselves into that expression of earnest attentiveness or subdued yet eager endeavour for which the camera operator, habitually, professionally, waits.19

  As Vaughan’s further analysis brilliantly suggests, it is precisely this awareness of the camera which detaches Jennings’s cutaway-faces from the camera. These shots give us a sense of ‘the “autonomy” of their subjects: their independent existence in a timescale, a history, a structure of motivations and meanings other than that whereby they take their place in the film’. Vaughan characterises the effect as involving a sense of ‘that “self-absorption” by which is meant virtually the opposite – absorption in something outside the self – since it does not recognise the outside as a threat’. I do not quite go along with his film-maker’s perception that we are aware of awareness of the camera and of trust in the crew. (Though, as he points out, even audiences in the forties might know perfectly well that documentary shots were faked – British Lion, the UK distributors of Listen to Britain, actually boasted in their ‘campaign book’ about how the Queen ‘graciously’ returned to the National Gallery auditorium for retakes and about how ‘spontaneous’ she nevertheless seems.20) The expression of simultaneous inwardness and trust takes us well beyond the immediate context of filming. It creates a much more general sensation of English (or British) character as one of deep goodwill, earnest or smiling innocence, typified most beautifully in the face of one of the girls singing ‘Yes My Darling Daughter’ in the great Listen to Britain sequence showing women at work in a factory. This is the face of the harmonious ‘new order’ swimming out of a depth of British tradition so profound that it could not otherwise be suggested than by Jennings’s (as it were) bathyscope. The effect is always very moving, even after a dozen viewings.

  Listen to Britain, so often casually pillaged by TV producers evoking Blitz, was in fact filmed in the early summer of 1941, when the bombing had almost stopped, after its horrific climax in London, Belfast, Clydeside, Merseyside and Plymouth. No one could be sure that the Luftwaffe wouldn’t return in force; Russia hadn’t yet been invaded. Britain still had no Great Power allies. Dai Vaughan says that the film grew ‘like fireweed on a bombsite’ out of Blitz experience.21 But it cannot be retained within the ‘moment’ of its filming as he suggests – Listen to Britain can’t simply be projecting the pride of a people standing up to Nazism but still all on their own. Its optimism must be flavoured by the post-filming, pre-editing sense of relief that the Soviet Union, after 22 June, was on Britain’s side and was standing up, as Poland and France hadn’t, to the ‘Nazi war-machine’.

  According to Joe Mendoza, assistant director of the film which was eventually credited to McAllister and Jennings as co-directors, Listen to Britain initially was to be ‘Lunch Hour’, about the famous National Gallery concerts, and it was Mendoza who not only argued successfully that Bach’s music would be too intellectual, but provided an analysis of the musical structure of the Mozart chosen, on the basis of which Jennings prepared a script. Then came Reynolds’s famous Postscript of 29 June – ‘Dear Doktor’ – and material filmed for a documentary related to that alone found its way into Listen to Britain, as well as out-takes from other Crown Film Unit documentaries. In August 1941, Jennings spent a week with McAllister in the latter’s native Lanarkshire.

  A colleague claimed that McAllister was ‘one of the few people who actually liked’ Jennings – ‘most people admired Humphrey, but very few liked him’. They were remembered as fighting ‘like cats’ over the editing process, but clearly this was because they both cared so deeply and possessively about the material. McAllister (1914–62) had begun as a promising painter, a student at the Glasgow School of Art, who had got involved in the city’s amateur film movement with the remarkable animator Norman McLaren. Of middle-class origins, McAllister seems to have had a socialistic view of life and film, despising commercialism. But his obsession with his work was his most obvious characteristic – he virtually lived in his cutting room, working all night until dawn, then sleeping all day. He would brood over film possessively before he cut it, emerging only to fall absurdly and impractically in love with any woman in sight.22

  Listen to Britain is structured (like London Can Take It) on a twenty-four-hour cycle, but also on the form, as provided by Mendoza, of classical symphony: allegro, then the adagio of night, the scherzo of morning, a lunch-hour finale. ‘People’s War’ imagery is transfigured into a unique and still delightful work of art.

  Words for Battle, however, has ‘dated’, interesting though it remains. Filmed earlier in 1941, while London was still being raided, it is a ‘five-minute short’ for the MoI which expanded to eight minutes. Its propagandist purpose is to show what Britain is fighting for. Each of its seven sections consists of a text, read by Laurence Olivier, with related or contrasting images. An excerpt from Camden’s Description of Britain is followed by one from Milton’s defence of freedom, Areopagitica – the poet’s image of England as ‘an eagle’ is matched with a shot of a Spitfire and airmen. After Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ and Browning’s ‘Home-Thoughts, from the Sea’, we are surprised by Kipling’s ‘The Beginnings’, about ‘when the English began to hate’, read over post-raid shots and a funeral procession down a ruined street. With Churchill’s speech of 4 June 1940, an image of the dome of St Paul’s comes up under ‘we shall never surrender’. In a characteristic sleight of British propaganda, determined to imply that the spirit of British government is identical with US democracy, Big Ben and Parliament illustrate ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people’ in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. This is the last and climactic text before tracking shot carries the film jauntily away, accompanied by Handel’s ‘Water Music’.23

  It is said that Jennings was not altogether happy with the choice of texts for Words for Battle, which is consistently unsubtle. So it would be unfair to deduce from the film that Jennings’s literary training and interests were liable to take over his work on occasions and spoil it. Some people find intrusive the ‘literary’ parts of Fires Were Started, when a Scottish fireman, ‘Rumbold’, recites to his mates first Ralegh’s address to ‘eloquent, just and mighty death’, then, much later, a passage from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. But the effect is utterly different from Words for Battle. If Ralegh’s sardonic, rolling praise of Death – ‘whom all the world hath flattered, thou hast cast out of the world and despised’ – has some superficial consonance with People’s War ideology, it also suggests a ‘universal’ truth obliterating
all difference between Briton and German, democrat and Nazi. The Macbeth quotation (‘Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men …’) conflates humans with dogs and suggests that the broad category ‘men’ includes differences as great as those between spaniels and ‘demi-wolves’: each man has a distinct aptitude. This works against the ethos of communal teamwork, suggesting instead the mode of epic, with individual heroes. There are other ways, of course, of explaining how these passages relate to the film as a whole, but they certainly represent that precious element of ‘instability’ which Nowell Smith praises: their use is certainly not ‘propagandist’ in any simple, direct way.

  Fires Were Started, however, began with a clear propaganda remit. Those concerned with public relations on behalf of Civil Defence wanted a film which would celebrate voluntary teamwork. Harry Watt had prodded Ian Dalrymple, the head of the Crown Film Unit, to get Jennings to make ‘an action picture, because everything is so static with Humphrey’. Jennings began work on the script in the early autumn of 1941; by the time the final, detailed, ‘shooting’ version was ready in January 1942, the London fire service had become used to relative inaction over nearly nine months since the last big raid and what we now see as the end of the Blitz.

  The story is very simple. Bill Barrett, an advertising copywriter, joins, as volunteer, a fire station in working-class east London. Soon he is called out with his colleagues to deal with a fire at a blazing warehouse which threatens a ship in the Port of London laden with ammunition. After an all-night struggle, the ship is saved and can sail on its war-winning way, but one fireman, Jacko, has died in the blaze and his funeral counterpoints the ship’s departure. The story eliminates all conflict except that of men (with women helping) against fire. There are hints of dramatic dissonance to begin with – why does the rather foreign-looking wife of Jacko the shopkeeper seem so sulky (sexual frustration)? will middle-class Barrett be accepted by his mates (class conflict)? These are red herrings, though useful enough in generating sufficient narrative suspense to keep going what (‘poetry’ apart) is essentially a film geared to one familiar objective of Griersonian documentary – the full and clear illustration of how a complex job of work is done.

  The actors were all ‘real-life’ – but full-time – firemen. William Sansom, a well-known fiction writer then in the fire service was cast as Barrett. Johnny Daniels was acted by an ex-taxi driver, Fred Griffiths, who went on to play similar working-class roles in some two hundred more films. A romantic account of the film’s making has Jennings improvising all the way through, making up dialogue on the spot. The truth seems to be less remarkable – that he incorporated interesting details which turned up by accident during filming, like a street penny-whistler discovered in an East End square. He called on Sansom to improvise at the piano, so the glorious sequence where the firemen enter one by one to the singing of ‘One man went to mow … two men went to mow’ – by implication like agriculturalists on their way to scythe the meadow of fire – may owe its freshness to not being quite foreseen. Sansom recalled the atmosphere thus: ‘Democracy the rule. Christian names all round, discussion and beer together after work. He gave us the sense of making the film with instead of for him.’

  But the superbly ‘surreal’ moment when a frightened horse passes the flames was carefully foreplanned – as everything to do with the fire had to be, for obvious reasons. (Despite this, most of those involved got burnt at one time or another.) Filming lasted for several months from February 1942. A real warehouse in St katherine’s Dock was ignited to provide the fire (which shows how blackout regulations no longer needed to be stringent, with visits from the Luftwaffe now so rare). Interiors were shot in Pinewood Studios, home base of the Crown Film Unit. The original title, I Was a Fireman, was changed after wrangles with distributors, who also insisted on a cut of several minutes in length. We now see the full seventy-five-minute version, but with the revised title – which takes a common phrase from news bulletins and has the effect, because of its passive tense, of underlining the most remarkable feature of the film, regarded as propaganda – the virtual absence of the enemy. The fire is like those natural disasters which Jennings thought typical of Walberswick life down the ages: the agents who started it are of no interest compared to the courage and resourcefulness of the people who put it out.

  Even the Griersonite Documentary News Letter was for once (like the rest of the press) full of praise for the film when it was released in 1943, applauding Jennings for ‘the best handling of people on and off the job that we’ve seen in any British film’, though characteristically deploring ‘three or four occasions when, with somebody playing the piano or reading or reciting poetry (in his worst Words For Battle manner), he goes all arty for a moment’.24

  This was the Myth brought to ultimate refinement by a director who himself believed that the bombs had awakened a wonderful spirit of ‘unselfishness’ in London, and who worked in a tradition, of which Night Mail was a distinguished example, which was skilled in analysing and depicting working processes. The contributions of McAllister and the composer William Alwyn seem to be wholly subordinated to Jennings’s own master conception. He wrote to his wife, on 12 April 1942:

  It has now become 14 hours a day – living in Stepney the whole time – really have never worked so hard at anything or I think thrown myself into anything so completely. Whatever the results it is definitely an advance in film making for me – really beginning to understand people and making friends with them and not just looking at them and lecturing or pitying them. Another general effect of the war.

  … Painting etc. I am afraid I haven’t touched for months now … Reading nothing. Life concerned with a burning roof – smoke fire water – men’s faces and thoughts: a tangle of hose, orders shouted in the dark – falling walls, brilliant moonlight – dust, mud, tiredness until nobody is quite sure where the film ends and the conditions of making it begin: a real fire could not be more tiring and certainly less trouble. But what one learns at midnight with tired firemen …25

  That was it then: real fire, real team spirit. But no actual bombs. So far from ‘beginning to hate’ as in Kipling’s poem the English in the film represent nothing but mutual self-sacrificing love. London’s Blitz is purged of any connection with the now much-advertised nightly raids of RAF Bomber Command over Germany, where ‘fires were started’ in Hamburg which Bill Barrett and his mates couldn’t have coped with and which more resembled apocalypse than natural disaster. A very clean propaganda film, eminently suitable for export. But also an extremely beautiful film, replete with intimations of a classless new order. ‘History’, as T. S. Eliot was writing while Jennings was at work on his film, was ‘now and England’. And, as Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ declared at the moment of its publication, which coincided with victory (at last) in North Africa and with the publication of the Beveridge Report, ‘All shall be well/And all manner of thing shall be well.’ The Fire and the Rose of England were one.

  Hollywood could not have been expected to deal with the Myth in such profoundly felt ways. Mrs Miniver, directed by the distinguished William Wyler, was an Oscar-winning success in 1942. Starring the popular Greer Garson as the eponymous heroine, it went down well in Britain, even though some reviewers and cinema-goers thought its view of Britain bogus.26 It represented Village (and also commuter) England, with a silly old feudal Lady deflated at the end, the middle classes (Miniver and her husband) Carrying On bravely at Dunkirk and under bombing, and the younger generation showing fine, classless, war-winning spirit. At the end, after planes have killed villagers, the vicar preaches in the bombed church. Henry Wilcoxson, acting the clergyman, apparently rewrote the sermon with Wyler so as to emphasise that ‘this is not only a war of soldiers in uniform, it is a war of the people – of all the people – and it must be fought not only on the battlefield but in … the heart of every man, woman and child who loves freedom’. Six million dollars grossed in the US alone proved that these sentiments were widely acceptable, and
also, presumably, that the English middle classes, being now one with ‘the people’, were acceptable allies in the cause of freedom.27

  Explaining the war to US servicemen in terms of how enemies and allies related to the cause of freedom became the remit of one of Hollywood’s finest and most successful directors, Frank Capra, famous for such populist pre-war movies as Mr Deeds Goes to Town, Mr Smith Goes to Washington and Meet John Doe.

  ‘Documentary’ film had a different, and perhaps less impressive, history in the USA: no figure like Grierson had emerged as prophet. Newsreel was a form common to both countries, but in the US, the March of Time, which had begun with a newsreel format, handling six or ten subjects per film, had gone over to presenting first two, then only one ‘in-depth’ presentation per issue. The US Film Service, set up in 1938 by FDR to make documentaries, had been quashed by anti-New Dealers in Congress two years later. The integrating control over both feature films and ‘documentary’ propaganda exercised in Britain by MoI would not be possible in the USA, though the Office of War Information, set up in June 1942, had the brief to produce movies, as well as attempt to bring Hollywood into line, and did so until Congress slashed its budget. Meanwhile, since 1936 the Signals Corps had been responsible to the War Department for producing training films. When it was decided after Pearl Harbor that ‘orientation’ films were also needed, Capra was brought in to head a special production unit within the Signals Corps. The aim was to inform and inspire the recruits flooding in to the US army, where over a third of the troops had no high-school education.28