Abstract
The logic of Leftists’ refraction of the mass-media in their texts and the dynamic effects that radio and especially film montage had on their techniques inevitably led to many incursions by writers themselves into broadcasting and the cinema. However, the pattern of motives and involvements was both complex and unprogram-matic, lacking a fully coherent theoretical and organisational basis. It was also inevitably conditioned by the technological and institutional conditions of the respective media, especially the collective nature of their products and the basic question of finance. Leftist writers, therefore, would have to wait for the unique circumstances of the Second World War, as we shall see, for the opportunity to intervene in any numbers and the chance to implement their notions about modernising form and politically progressive content in practice. For the purposes of this comparison. I have therefore divided this chapter into separate sections on writers’ pre- and post-1939 involvements.
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4 Involvements: Writing for the Mass Media
For Huxley’s other broadcasting, see The Hidden Huxley: Contempt and Compassion for the Masses 1920–1936, ed. David Bradshaw (London: Faber, 1994).
Day Lewis, Revolution in Writing, p. 11. This talk, which became Part One, The Revolution in Literature’, was nonetheless published in The Listener, Vol. XIII, No. 324 (27 March 1935), pp. 511–12 and 537.
Cunningham, p. 292.
John Grierson, Preface to Paul Rotha, Documentary Film (London: Faber, 1935), pp. 8–9.
Sieveking, Stuff of Radio, p. 15. Also Paddy Scannell, ‘“The Stuff of Radio”: Developments in Radio Features and Documentaries before the War’ in John Corner (ed.), Documentary and the Mass Media (London: Edward Arnold, 1986), p. 24.
D. G. Bridson, Prospero and Ariel: The Rise and Fall of Radio: A Personal Recollection (London: Gollancz, 1971), p. 41. The association of politically and linguistically radical texts with Caliban was not uncommon at the time as in, for example. Jack Hilton’s contemporary proletarian autobiography Caliban Shrieks (1935), praised by Orwell for using the ‘authentic accents’ of the working man (see Collected Essays, I, p. 173).
Rodger, Radio Drama, p. 16.
Tyrone Guthrie, ‘The Future of Broadcast Drama’, BBC Yearbook (London: BBC, 1931), pp. 185–90, especially p. 189.
Tyrone Guthrie, Introduction to Squirrel’s Cage and Two Other Microphone Plays (London: Cobden Sanderson, 1931), pp. 8–10.
Rodger, Radio Drama, pp. 20–1. Also Richard Hughes, Introduction to Sieveking, Stuff of Radio, p. 7.
Gielgud, British Radio Drama, p. 68.
Rodger, Radio Drama, pp. 24–5.
See Erik Barnouw, A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the US, Vol. II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966–70), pp. 66–70.
Also Archibald MacLeish, Foreword to The Fall of the City: A Verse Play For Radio (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937), pp. ix–xiii.
Rodger, Radio Drama, pp. 11 and 39.
Sieveking, Stuff of Radio, p. 48.
The Listener, Vol. XVII, No. 433 (28 April 1937), p. 829.
D. G. Bridson, Foreword ‘On Spoken and Written Poetry’, The Christmas Child (London: Falcon Press, 1950), pp. 1–12.
Henceforth, all page references to The Christmas Child will be given in brackets in the text. Also Louis MacNeice, Introduction to Christopher Columbus: A Radio Play (London: Faber, 1944), p. 8.
Lance Sieveking, Stuff of Radio, p. 2.
Editorial, ‘Reviving Radio Plays’ The Listener, Vol. IX, No. 218 (15 March 1933), p. 400.
Also Grace Wyndham Goldie, ‘Technique of the Radio Play’, The Listener, Vol. XVII, No. 425 (3 March 1937), p. 408.
Sieveking, Stuff of Radio, pp. 25–6.
Gielgud, British Radio Drama, p. 48. Also Rayner Heppenstall, Portrait of the Artist as a Professional Man (London: Peter Owen, 1969), p. 26.
MacNeice, Christopher Columbus, p. 12. Cf. the ‘Introductory Note’ to MacNeice’s ‘feature-biography’ on Chekhov, Sunbeams in his Hat, which indicated the range inherent in wartime propaganda features in his The Dark Tower and Other Radio Scripts (London: Faber, 1947), p. 69.
See Sieveking, Stuff of Radio, pp. 33–43. In another chapter, ‘And Then Take the Movies’, Sieveking compared radio with film. Among other things, he discussed Pudovkin’s ideas against his own play Intimate Snapshots (broadcast on 22 November 1929; script on pp. 279–307), also radio’s temporal equivalent of spatial effects and excerpting of actuality. He argued there was feedback the other way too. The talkies suggested mass-movement/ironic simultaneity by using ‘sound-montage’. In Gabriel Over the White House (1993), ‘the loud speaker… was giving the unemployed leader’s speech, while the President and his nephew talked through it and played games’ (Stuff of Radio, p. 41).
Heppenstall, Portrait of the Artist As a Professional Man, p. 26. Grace Wyndham Goldie, ‘Technique of the Radio Play’, The Listener, Vol. XVII, No. 425 (3 March 1937), p. 408.
Sieveking, Stuff of Radio, pp. 22–3, and 31–2.
Scanneil in Corner (ed.), Documentary and the Mass-Media, pp. 5–6. Also, A Social History of British Broadcasting, Vol. I, p. 139.
See Bridson’s account in Prospero and Ariel, p. 20.
Rodger, Radio Drama, p. 47.
Bridson, Prospero and Ariel, p. 34. Bridson’s ‘Song for the Three Million’ has affinities with the metre and voice of Auden poems such as ‘A Communist to Others’ or ‘Song for the New Year’.
Bridson, Prospero and Ariel, pp. 51–3.
Rodger, Radio Drama, pp. 44–5 and 46.
Scanneil, in Corner, Documentary and the Mass-Media, pp. 15 and 26. Also in A Social History of British Broadcasting, Vol. I, p. 341.
Bridson, Prospero and Ariel, p. 57.
For Guthrie and MacLeish’s responses, see Rodger, Radio Drama, p. 48. Also MacNeice, Christopher Columbus, p. 15.
Rodger, Radio Drama, p. 47.
See Bridson, Christmas Child, notes on pp. 231–2. Also Bridson, Prospero and Ariel, p. 59.
Scanneil in Corner (ed.), Documentary and the Mass-Media, p. 16.
Quoted in above, p. 38.
See Scanneil, in Corner (ed.), Documentary and the Mass-Media, p. 17. Also A Social History of British Broadcasting, Vol. I, p. 342.
Brancepath Colliery, Wilmington, Co. Durham was eventually chosen. Coal was broadcast on 17 November 1938. (See account in Scanneil and Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting, Vol. I, p. 353.
Ibid., p. 354.
Ibid.
For Shapley’s features, see Scannell, in Corner (ed.), Documentary and the Mass-Media, p. 22, and A Social History of British Broadcasting, Vol. I, pp. 344 and 349.
Britain by Mass-Observation, p. 210. Much of this study was concerned with analysing the change in public response to Chamberlain’s pact with Hitler once the cost of ‘peace’ to the Czechs became known.
Bridson, Prospero and Ariel, p. 61. Also Rodger, Radio Drama, p. 49.
Day Lewis (ed.), Mind in Chains, pp. 14–15. Also Calder-Marshall, in ibid., p. 63.
Letter to Frieda Lawrence (7 October 1940) in Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), p. 459.
And cf. David King Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), pp. 154–5.
Greene, Collected Essays, pp. 425–6.
Greene, ‘The Novelist and the Cinema: A Personal Experience’ in William Whitebait (ed.), International Film Annual (New York: Doubleday, 1958), p. 54.
See Richards, Dream Palace, p. 315.
Ibid., p. 181.
Ibid., p. 183.
Numerous examples are reproduced in, among others, Worktown: Photographs of Bolton and Blackpool Taken for Mass-Observation 1937–38 (Brighton: Gardner Centre Gallery, 1987). For examples of M-O’s interest in popular seaside culture, see Worktowners at Blackpool: Mass-Observation and Popular Leisure in the 1930s, ed. Gary Cross (London: Routledge, 1990).
Priestley, English Journey, p. 252.
See Hingley, Russian Writers, pp. 199–200, and Frank Whitford, ‘The Triumph of the Banal: Art in Nazi Germany’ in Collier and Timms (eds.), Visions and Blueprints, pp. 252–69.
Richards, Dream Palace, p. 303.
See ‘The Age of Consensus: South Riding’, in Jeffrey Richards and Anthony Aldgate, Best of British (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), pp. 29–42, especially p. 34.
Also Victor Small, Left Review (April 1983), p. 936: ‘The Holtby story has everything that makes for good cinema, but as usual it was realised that the social significance of the story could not be allowed on the screen unaltered.’
Richards, Dream Palace, p. 321. See also Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 38.
Basil Wright, The Long View (London: Secker and Warburg, 1974), p. 94.
Greene in Whitebait (ed.), International Film Annual, p. 56.
Graham Greene, Journey without Maps (London: Heinemann, 1936), p. 24. Also cf. Ways of Escape, pp. 22–3.
See Greene’s own remarks to Marie-François Allain in Conversations with Graham Greene (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 146. Cf. also this Chapter, below, James Agee’s point about the film of The Confidential Agent being ‘less cinematic’ than the book.
Greene in International Film Annual, p. 61.
Interview, ‘The Screenwriter’ from The Making of Feature Films: A Guide by Ivan Butler (Pelican, 1971), pp. 71–2, p. 523).
The published version of The Third Man was a in fact a ‘treatment’ not a screenplay or final shooting script. The only one of the latter Greene did was for the film of Brighton Rock (1947).
See Greene, Ways of Escape, p. 50.
For a detailed description of Greene’s 1936 improvisation and the resulting film, see Ways of Escape, p. 50, and Quentin Falk, Travels in Greeneland: The Cinema of Graham Greene (Quartet, 1984; revised pbk, 1990), p. 12.
Greene rubbished it himself while acknowledging his own culpability (See Spectator, 12 January 1940; Mornings in the Dark, p. 363).
See the Preface to The Third Man and the Fallen Idol (London: Heinemann, 1950), pp. 145–6.
Isherwood’s account is in Christopher and His Kind, Chapter 9, pp. 115–31. For Viertel’s influence on British cinema, see Günter Berghaus, Theatre and Film in Exile: German Artists in Britain, 1933– 1945 (London: Berg Publishers, 1989), especially Kevin Gough-Yates, ‘The British Feature Film as a European Concern: Britain and the Emigré Film-Maker, 1933–45, pp. 135–66. In real life, Jean Ross was far from naively starstruck and had radical film credentials of her own. Married to Claud Cockburn, editor of the exposé journal The Week, she became Daily Worker film critic, ‘Peter Porcupine’ and secretary to the Workers’ Film and Photo League.
Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, p. 117. The plot of ‘Prater Violet the movie’ was pastiched by John van Druten, who, arguably, later also saccharined Goodbye to Berlin to a certain extent as a (1951) stage play. (See Chapter 3, The Cold War Against Mummy: Van Druten’s I Am a Camera in Mizejewski, Divine Decadence, pp. 85–119.)
Christopher Isherwood, Prater Violet (London: Methuen, 1946; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 20. Henceforth, all page references to Prater Violet will be given in brackets in the text.
See Christopher and His Kind, p. 91.
Ibid., p. 131.
See Chapter 3, ‘Money or the Circulation of Commodities’, of Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Foukes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 189–244.
Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 233. Cf. Vertov, Kino-Eye, pp. 34–5. Grierson on Documentary, pp. 135–8, for their accounts of how film could reverse the disappearance of production into commodities.
See The Reichstag Fire Trial: The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror (London: Editions du Carrefour, 1934), produced by ‘The World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism’, a front for Münzenberg’s German Communist propaganda machine, then operating in exile in Paris.
It was not only a rare exception, but an internationally successful film, as the Nazi’s Staatsauftragfilms counter-version of it, Jud Süss (1940), suggests.
Grierson, quoted in Cunningham, British Writers, p. 329.
See Hogenkamp, Deadly Parallels, p. 106.
Lewis Jones, We Live: The Story of a Welsh Mining Valley (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1939; repr. 1978).
Grierson’s own definition of documentary (see his article ‘The Documentary Producer’, Cinema Quarterly, Vol. II, No. 1 (1933), p. 8.
Esmond Romilly, Boadilla (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1937; repr. with an intro. and notes by Hugh Thomas by Macdonald, 1971), pp. 22–3.
Day Lewis, ‘Where Are the War Poets?’, Collected Poems, p. 228.
‘Why Not War Writers’, Horizon, Vol. IV (October 1941), pp. 236–9.
Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and Ministry of Information in World War II (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979).
Mass-Observation, War Begins at Home, ed. and arranged Tom Harrison and Charles Madge (London: Chatto and Windus, 1940), p. 13.
Graham Greene, Collected Stories (Vol. VIII of the The Collected Works) (London: Bodley Head/Heinemann, 1972), p. 395.
Henceforth, all references to Collected Stories will be given in brackets in the text. Cf. Waugh’s similar experience-based satire of MoI ineptitude in Put Out More Flags (London: Chapman and Hall, 1942).
See Orwell’s remark that the Government could not rely simply on ‘safe’ Right-wing popular novelists like Ian Hay and A. P. Herbert to produce effective wartime propaganda, in Collected Essays, II, p. 381.
Pronay, in Short (ed.), Film and Radio Propaganda, p. 52.
For the ‘Empire Crusade’, see McLaine, Ministry of Morale, pp. 223–4.
M-O, War Begins At Home, p. 270. A BBC reporter, Charles Gardner, set the precedent for this kind of ‘sporting’ coverage by a sponta-neous on-the-spot coverage of an early aerial dog-fight above Dover as if it were a cricket match. See Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), p. 31.
McLaine, Ministry of Morale, pp. 10–11.
See Daniel Lerner, ‘Effective Propaganda’ in his (ed.) Propaganda in War and Crisis: Materials for American Policy (New York: G. W. Stewart, 1951).
Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–45 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), p. 471. Cf. Orwell’s comments on how the space occupied by MoI posters was gradually taken over by advertising again as the war neared its end (Collected Essays, III, pp. 217–18).
Arthur Koestler, ‘The Intelligentsia’, Horizon (March 1944), repr. in The Yogi and the Commissar (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945), p. 83.
Cyril Connolly, ‘Comment’, Horizon, Vol. VI (December 1942), p. 371.
Not only did Orwell put his own media experiences to good literary use, but probably his wife’s as well: Eileen Blair wrote copy for the Ministry of Food programme Kitchen Front, likely source of some of the covering up of shortages and the ersatz nature of the basic quality of life under Ingsoc. (See Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London: Secker and Warburg, 1980; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 434.)
McLaine, Ministry of Morale, p. 28. A perfect example of the MoI’s softening up of a potentially hostile public was its recruitment of Orwell to broadcast to India. (See below, this chapter.) An instance of its deception would be the continuous denial that civilian population centres were never deliberately targeted in Bomber Command mass raids. (See McLaine, pp. 156–66, and below, this chapter, for examples of how writers involved in the media, like Orwell and Michael Foot, were misinformed by the MoI about this.)
Harold Nicolson, diary entry (3 July 1940), Diaries and Letters, Vol. II (London: Collins, 1967), p. 99.
McLaine, Ministry of Morale, pp. 194–5.
See McLaine, ibid., p. 48. Picture Post, The Daily Worker and The Week were all, in effect, banned at home and/or for export by such means at various stages of the war.
Quoted in McLaine, Ministry of Morale, p. 156.
‘Went the Day Well?’ was itself the title of a poem written by John Maxwell Edmonds for the Great War Graves Commission. See the Introduction to French and Wlaschin (eds), Faber Book of Movie Verse, p. 7. For the script of Words for Battle, see Jackson (ed.), Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, pp. 17–23.
See Rodger, Radio Drama, p. 60.
Pimpernel Smith is said to have inspired the ‘Swedish Schindler’, Raoul Wallenberg. Howard’s impact on writers was acknowledged in Maurice Lindsay’s poetic epitaph, ‘Elegy for an Actor Drowned in Time of War’ (repr. in French and Wlaschin (eds), Faber Book of Movie Verse, pp. 232–3) and in Priestley’s BBC memorial broadcast (6 June 1943).
Calder, People’s War, pp. 513 and 364, respectively.
Rodger, Radio Drama, p. 54.
See Rodger, ibid., p. 69.
See Bridson, Prospero and Ariel, p. 72.
Bridson Aaron’s Field (London: Pendock Press, 1943), pp. 41–2 and p. 34. (Also repr. in Christmas Child, pp. 54–91.)
See Wilfred Pickles’s autobiography, Between You and Me (London: Werner Laurie, 1949), p. 126.
Bridson, Prospero and Ariel, pp. 80 and 84.
McLaine, Ministry of Morale, p. 203.
Bridson, Prospero and Ariel, p. 97, and cross-ref. The (particularly linguistically) democratising war propaganda called for by Greene, The Documentary Newsletter group and Horizon ‘War Writers Manifesto’ was especially important in the US.
See Prospero and Ariel, pp. 109–10.
The reading in this feature of ‘Reported Missing’ by Bridson’s fellow radio producer-poet, John Pudney, made it ‘for a while, the best known poem of World War Two’. (See French and Wlaschin (eds) Faber Book of Movie Verse, p. 9.)
Bridson, Prospero and Ariel, p. 94.
Johnny Miner was dedicated to colliers’ leader and writer A. L. Loyd, himself editor of a collection of folklore, Come All Ye Miners: Ballads and Songs of the Coalfields (London: Wishart, 1952).
Drakakis (ed.), British Radio Drama, p. 31.
MacNeice, Modern Poetry, pp. 193–4.
MacNeice, Introduction to Christopher Columbus: A Radio Play (London: Faber, 1944), p. 12
(repr. in Peter MacDonald and Alan Heuser (eds), Selected Plays of Louis MacNeice (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993) as Appendix 1, pp. 393–402).
Henceforth, all page references to Christopher Columbus will be given in brackets in the text. MacDonald draws attention to the importance of classical and morality play elements in MacNeice’s radio drama in his introduction to the Selected Plays, p. xiii. The Doubt/Faith chorus in Christopher Columbus, for example, seems to have been influenced by T. S. Eliot’s earlier attempts to resucitate such devices in The Family Reunion (1939).
There is evidence that MacNeice’s esteem for the ‘ordinary listener’s’ intellectual astuteness rose even higher during the war. In MacNeice’s feature Four Years at War (3 September 1943) a sceptical ‘listener’s voice’ constantly interrupts the official triumphalism to make claims for his own efforts, to shape the programme and to call for a ‘Battle of the Peace’ when it is over. Compare this to his more naive counterpart in Out of the Picture.
For an example of MacNeice’s thirties broadcasts, see ‘Tendencies in Modern Poetry: Discussion between F. R. Higgins and Louis MacNeice, broadcast from Northern Ireland’, in The Listener, Vol. XXII, No. 550 (27 July 1939), pp. 185–6. MacNeice’s ambivalent attitude to war work is quoted in Coulton, Louis MacNeice in the BBC, p. 47.
See MacDonald’s introduction to Selected Plays of Louis MacNeice, p. xi. Coulton’s account of the writing of the D-Day piece is in her Louis MacNeice at the BBC, p. 67. Also Rodger, Radio Drama, pp. 66 and 151.
Bridson, Prospero and Ariel, p. 81.
See McLaine, Ministry of Morale, pp. 264 and 271–2.
MacNeice, Horizon, Vol. III, No. 15 (March 1941) repr. in Selected Prose, pp. 92 and 94.
Ibid., pp. 106–11.
Cf. MacNeice’s script for another feature in the same series, A Cook’s Tour of the London Subways, The Listener, Vol. XXV, No. 640 (17 April 1941), pp. 554–60.
See Louis MacNeice, The Nosebag in his The Dark Tower and Other Radio Scripts (Faber: London, 1947), pp. 132–3.
Bridson, Prospero and Ariel, p. 81. Also Gielgud British Radio Drama, p. 69. Besides MacNeice’s own acknowledgement of the influence of Bridson’s March of the ‘45, Christopher Columbus also used a running commentary in verse over triumphant processional music recalling MacLeish’s Fall of the City.
A performance of the Agincourt scene from Henry V was among the first wartime propaganda broadcasts and Olivier’s film was also influenced by Eisenstein’s Nevsky. Calder argues Churchill’s morale-boosting aristocratic populism also played up to Shakespeare’s idea of a ‘little touch of Harry in the night’ (see People’s War, p. 94).
Guthrie’s influence was acknowledged in MacNeice’s 1949 Introduction (see MacNeice, Selected Plays, p. 72). Henceforth, all page references to Selected Plays will be given in brackets in the text. He Had A Date also has a similar structure to other ‘radiogenic’ retrospectives on the thirties like Bridson’s Johnny Miner and Theatre Workshop’s Johnny Noble, etc.
See Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, pp. 188 and 2–3, respectively. Also Cornford, Collected Writings, p. 188.
Robert Hewison, Under Siege (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977: repr. in paperback by Quartet, 1979), p. 160.
Also Ted Kavanagh, Tommy Handley (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1949), pp. 116–17, and cf. Calder, People’s War, p. 65.
MacNeice, Introductory Note to The Dark Tower, p. 21.
See General Introduction to The Dark Tower, pp. 9–17.
For BBC truthfulness and German intelligence see McLaine, Ministry of Morale, pp. 80–1. For Haw-Haw’s ‘ratings’, see Calder, People’s War, p. 65.
McLaine, Ministry of Morale, p. 99.
J. B. Priestley, Postscripts (London: Heinemann, 1940), pp. vi and vii. Henceforth, all page references to Postscripts will be given in brackets in the text.
For the impact of Priestley’s broadcasts see Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz, especially pp. 196–204.
Cf. Priestley’s parallel to Murrow’s voiceover for the film London/Britain Can Take It, in Britain at Bay (both of 1940).
According to Briggs, on average 31 per cent of the adult population listened in. (See A History of Broadcasting, Vol. III, The War of the Words (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 210.)
Greene, ‘Review of Postscripts’, Spectator (13 December 1940; repr. in Reflections, pp. 87–8).
MacNeice, ‘London Letter’ to Common Sense (May 1941), repr. in Selected Prose, p. 115.
See J. B. Priestley, Margin Released (London: Heinemann, 1962), p. 221.
This is ironically confirmed by the wall-poster Priestley wrote for the MoI’s ‘Anger Campaign’ called The Secret Beast (see McLaine Ministry of Morale, pp. 146–7). Such crudity was mercifully not very frequent in propaganda from Leftist writers.
For Empson’s theory that proletarian art displaced pastoral into class terms, see Chapter 1 of his Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto and Windus, 1935). For the cultural history of ‘Deep England’, Calder, Myth of the Blitz, especially pp. 182–3.
General Guilo Douhet’s Il dominio dell’ aria was published in 1921. For British attitudes to his theory, see Tom Harrisson, Living Through the Blitz (London: Collins, 1976; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 21–4.
See Greene, Reflections, p. 87. Priestley had begun exploring the dramatic possibilities of J. W. Dunne’s ideas in Time and the Conways (1937) (see Note 145 to Chapter 2, above).
Priestley gave a later account of typical buck-passing bureaucratic chicanery. The MoI told him the decision was the BBC’s; the BBC finally told him it was an MoI directive. (See his Margin Released, pp. 221–2.) Richard Maconachie, Talks Director, was also known to be unhappy about the ‘controversial’ politics of the Postscripts. (See Briggs, History of Broadcasting, III, p. 211.)
The Nazi broadcast is quoted in Briggs, ibid., p. 232. In Powell and Pressburger’s 1943 film The Life and Death Colonel Blimp, Blimp is scheduled to give a BBC talk, but finds himself replaced by Priestley.
The second series began on 26th January 1941 and almost immediately provoked protests from the Tory 1922 Committee to the Minister of Information, Duff Cooper, who thereafter restricted Priestley to six programmes in rotation with others. (See Briggs, History of Broadcasting, III, pp. 322 and 619.) For Priestley’s ideas about the 1941 Committee, see his Out of the People (London: Heinemann, 1941).
For Orwell’s wartime film reviews in Time and Tide, see Crick, George Orwell, pp. 383–4.
See George Orwell, The War Commentaries, ed. W. J. West (London: Duckworth, 1985; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), especially the MoI special issue report quoted by West on pp. 20–2.
Animal Farm was officially muzzled until it became equally expedient among the British and American Right to promote it. (See Collected Essays, III, p. 212 and IV, pp. 433–4.) As MacLaine shows, the MoI advised publishers to reject it (see Ministry of Morale, p. 203).
Orwell, War Commentaries, p. 93. (Orwell’s views on Indian independence were set out extensively in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941, repr. in his Collected Essays, II, pp. 122–4). Henceforth, all page references to the War Commentaries will be given in brackets in the text.
Grierson on Documentary, p. 101.
See George Orwell, The War Broadcasts, ed. W. J. West (London: Duckworth, 1985; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), pp. 139–48 and 95–111. Henceforth, all page references to War Broadcasts will be given in brackets in the text.
For Koestler’s attempts to broadcast evidence of the Endlösung brought back by an agent of the Polish Government in Exile in 1942 and the public response, see his ‘On Disbelieving Atrocities’, Yogi and the Commissar, pp. 94–9 and The Invisible Writing: The Second Volume of an Autobiography (London: Collins/Hamish Hamilton, 1954; repr. Hutchinson pbk 1969), pp. 521–2. See also discussion later in this chapter of Koestler’s MoI filmscript on the concentration camps.
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Alfred A. Knopf (London: Faber, 1982), p. 3.
See, for example, Orwell’s diary entry for 21 June 1942 (Collected Essays, II, pp. 489–90).
Agee singled out I Was a Fireman, Before the Raid, ABCA, Psychiatry in Action among others. (See Agee on Film, Vol. I, Reviews and Comments by James Agee (London: Peter Owen, 1963), pp. 33–4, and cf. pp. 57–8).
See Calder, People’s War, p. 369.
See the Section on MoI shorts in Mass-Observation at the Movies, pp. 424–60 and Tom Harrisson, ‘Films and the Home Front’ in Pronay and Spring, Propaganda, Politics and Film (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 234–48. Also Taylor quoted in McLaine, Ministry of Morale, p. 279.
See Mass-Observation at the Movies, pp. 15–16. However, Paul Fussell shows audiences were growing impatient with Mrs Miniver by 1944. (See his Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 189.)
Fussell, Wartime, p. 190. Also Agee, Nation (1 May 1943), repr. in Agee on Film, pp. 33–4.
Fussell, Wartime, p. 190. Also Keith Douglas, Alamein to Zem Zem (London: Editions Poetry, 1946; repr. Faber, 1992), p. 18.
Richards, Dream Palace, p. 309. Also Nicholas Pronay, “The Land of Promise “: The Projection of Peace Aims in Britain’, in Short (ed.), Radio and Film Propaganda, pp. 51–77, especially p. 67.
See Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, especially pp. 6–10, 38–55 and 302.
William Whitebait, quoted in Aldgate and Richards, Britain Can Take It, p. 109.
Aldgate and Richards, ibid., p. 4.
See Nicholas Pronay and Jeremy Croft, ‘British Film Censorship and Propaganda Policy during the Second World War’, in James Curran and Vincent Porter (eds), British Cinema History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), pp. 155–63). Also Aldgate and Richards, Britain Can Take It, pp. 248–9.
See Agee on Film, pp. 222–4.
Calder-Marshall, quoted in Britain Can Take It, pp. 256–7.
See Coultass, Images for Battle, pp. 137 and 183.
Miles and Smith, Cinema, Literature and Society, p. 244.
For a full account of the filming, see S. Constantine, ‘Love on the Dole and its Reception in the 1930s’, Literature and History, Vol. VIII, No. 2 (Autumn 1982), pp. 232–47.
The screen pattern for urban regeneration was set in the documentary scripted by Dylan Thomas, New Towns for Old (1942). Its ‘structure of expectations’ hardly anticipated the dreadful design errors and non-consultation of some postwar rehousing schemes.
See Paul Swann, The British Documentary Film Movement 1926–1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 139.
William Whitebait, New Statesman, Vol. XXIV, No. 595 (18 July 1942), p. 42.
Also Harrisson in Pronay and Spring (eds), Propaganda, Politics and Film, p. 239.
Coultass, Images for Battle, p. 45.
Morton Dauwen Zabel, ‘The Best and the Worst’, in Samuel Hynes (ed.), Graham Greene: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1973), p. 31.
See McLaine, Ministry of Morale, p. 48. Also Penelope Houston, Went the Day Well? (London: British Film Institute, 1993) and Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Britain Can Take It, pp. 17 and 133. This MoI multimedia campaign is a possible source of the daily ‘Two Minutes Hate’ in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Repr. along with Greene’s Liberty Radio-like tale about the subversion of Nazi broadcasting, ‘The News in English’, in The Last Word and Other Stories (London: Reindardt, 1990), pp. 46–59 and 19–31, respectively.
Quoted in McLaine, Ministry of Morale, p. 75.
Charles Barr, Ealing Studios (London: Cameron and Taylor/David and Charles, 1977), pp. 32–3.
Tom Hopkinson Of This Our Time: A Journalist’s Story 1905–50 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), p. 74.
See Aldgate and Richards, Britain Can Take It, p. 131. Also cf. Barr Ealing Studios, pp. 31–2, and Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror For England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (London: Faber, 1970), pp. 15–16.
For the British pro and anti reviews, see Houston, Went the Day Well?, pp. 53–5. Also Agee, Nation (15 July 1944), repr. in Agee on Film, p. 104.
Greene, Ways of Escape, pp. 54–5.
Nation (10 November 1945), Agee on Film, pp. 178–9.
Nation (4 October 1944), Agee on Film, p. 122.
For further commentary on all these films, see Coultass, Images for Battle, pp. 57, p. 61 and pp. 144–5. Also Aldgate and Richard’s chapter on Thunder Rock, ‘Signs of the Times’, in Britain Can Take It, pp. 168–86.
For biographical information, see Clive Fleay, ‘Voices in the Gallery: George Orwell and Jack Hilton’ and other contributions to The Itch of Class: Essays in Memory of Jack Hilton, Middlesex Polytechnic History Journal, Vol. II, No. 1 (Spring 1985), pp. 55–81.
Pronay in Short (ed.), Film and Radio Propaganda, p. 65 (Pronay also quotes Thomas’s script). And cf. Coultass’s account of Thomas’s involvement with wartime cinema in Images for Battle, pp. 94 and 117.
See Coultass, Images for Battle, p. 189. Some of the script of Diary for Timothy is repr. in the Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, pp. 96–100.
See Note 159 above, and Coultass Images for Battle, pp. 133–5. For Home Intelligence’s reports on the wartime increase in British antisemitism, see McLaine, Ministry of Morale, pp. 166–8.
See, among others, James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988)
also his The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
Fussell, Wartime, p. 164.
Keith Douglas, Alamein to Zem Zem, p. 131. Henceforth, all page references to Alamein to Zem Zem will be given in brackets in the text.
Douglas referred to the stolidly absurd, but unflappably English characters created by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat in their script for Hitchcock’s covertly anti-fascist thriller The Lady Vanishes (1938).
So popular that they reappeared in the wartime morale-booster Night Train to Munich (1940).
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Williams, K. (1996). Involvements: Writing for the Mass Media. In: British Writers and the Media, 1930–45. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24578-9_5
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