Britain at Bay is a programme of films from the BFI National Archive, some rarely screened, others rightly celebrated, that vividly capture the transition from optimism to high alert as the nation faced up to another momentous conflict.
For many, British life in the inter-war years was characterised by idealism and optimism, an age in which tradition was celebrated and new ideas embraced.
Despite the trauma of the Great Depression, the 1930s became the era of Mass Observation, an attempt to capture the minutiae of everyday British life, and the ‘Machine Age’, which saw developments in industry, consumer products and public amenities enabling the population at large to enjoy improvements to every aspect of work and leisure. Yet just as progress beckoned, the government had to prepare its citizens for the worst as war with Germany shifted from distant threat to grim reality.
Films
Around the Village Green
Evelyn Spice & Marion Grierson | 1937 | 12 mins
As well as picturesque scenes of village life in Essex, this film offers insight into the changing economic and social history of village life in the late 1930s, such as new bus services – essential for the young to get to work in the towns. Expectations are rising amongst this new generation. Running water rather than a communal well is now the order of the day. Hooray for one villager refusing to move with the times who declares “I haven’t got a bath but I’ve got a river down the bottom of the garden, so I can have a good bath when I want one.”
English Harvest
Humphrey Jennings | 1938 | 9 mins
Focusing on an August harvest the old makes way for the new as the trusty old scythe bows down to the horse drawn binder and plough. Hard work, flat caps and pipes abound as we see the workers downing midday ale for sustenance and taking a hard-earned break for a cup of tea brought to them in the fields by their wives. The ‘playground of the town’ and ‘workshop of the country’, alias the great British countryside, has never looked better.
Sam Goes Shopping
Harold Purcell | 1939 | 6 mins
Sam has a remarkable moustache and a talent for forgetting things. Recounted in this tuneful ditty is the time he arrives at the local Co-op just before closing time, remembering only that what he came in for begins with a ‘D’. Shop assistants bend over backwards to help, offering Sam everything from doormats to dominoes. They even miss their dates (a young Terry Thomas pops up as the forgotten boyfriend waiting patiently in the car). This early ad is a jolly reminder that if it’s impeccable service you’re after, head for the Co-op because whatever you want, they’ve got it.
Spare Time
Humphrey Jennings | 1939 | 15 mins
Encapsulating the poetry of the everyday via the sheer diversity of people’s hobbies, from pigeon racing to amateur dramatics, this mini masterpiece, directed by celebrated documentarist Humphrey Jennings, takes a look at what coal, steel and cotton workers do in their spare time.
War Library Items 1, 2 and 3
1939 | 10 mins
Produced by the GPO, these films demonstrate the consummate efficiency of the essential services.
War Library Items # 1 Who Are You?
Commentator Herbert Hodge gently reminds us that “they’ve got us all safe now, provided we don’t lose our identity cards”, whilst enumerators across the country record the names of 13 million householders during the national registration of 1939.
War Library Items # 2 Standing By
Darts and knitting don’t just pass the time, they are essential because if enemy aircraft reach our shores, these doctors and nurses need to be physically and mentally fit.
War Library Items #3 Where’s the Fire?
“The second fire of London is now blazing, in theory that is.” Being a volunteer fire fighter wasn’t the easy way out as this footage of an Auxiliary Fire Service drill on the Thames shows.
If War Should Come
1939 | 9 mins
War was a reality by the time this public information film was shown in 2,000 cinemas across the country in September 1939. The listing of civil defence precautions for householders – do build a steel shelter, don’t panic buy – was meant to reassure and ready Britons for war. However a local policeman in a gas mask waving a hand rattle accompanied by the alien sound of an air raid siren may have had quite the opposite effect.
The First Days
Pat Jackson, Humphrey Jennings, Harry Watt | 1939 | 22 mins
Chamberlain’s declaration of war echoes around the streets of London as this GPO film documents the first days of the capital preparing for invasion. Barrage balloons rise above the Thames, old masters are removed from the National Gallery, 750,000 children are evacuated to the country. From filling sandbags to reinforcing the walls of Scotland Yard, Londoners perform their civic duty. Produced shortly before the GPO was subsumed into the Ministry of Information, The First Days is one of the earliest wartime documentaries.
Britain at Bay
Harry Watt | 1940 | 7 mins
Britain at Bay juxtaposes instantly resounding landscape images: green and pleasant, dark and smoky. Big Ben is defiant even when filmed behind barbed wire, and Dover’s white cliffs are not yet clichéd. Shots of sea and sky complement narrator J.B. Priestley’s invocation of a national history so old it brushes eternity.