Dark Days

‘The Stars Look Down’ (1940) stars Michael Redgrave and is set in a North Eastern mining town in the 1930s.  Above all else, it demonstrated to me the unremitting misery of the 19th and 20^th Century coal community.  This is of particular personal interest to me.  Although I grew up in Sheffield, with steel workers as my immediate antecedents, in 1999 I moved to a traditional coal mining town.  My work put me in touch with many old miners and I found myself working in communities where mining was gone but by no means forgotten.  I have seen how the memory of dark times has been passed on down the generations, so that even decades old grievances can be brought into play without either side thinking it strange.  This is history that remains difficult to shake off.  I found it bemusing at first.

‘The Stars Look Down’ portrays a community that is downtrodden by its livelihood.  When the workers try and make a stand against the greed of the pit owners, the mine closes and they are left with nothing.  There is no alternative work.  The whole town is dragged down as people can’t afford to buy from the shopkeepers and small tradesmen.  With nothing else to kick against, they turn in on themselves.  Those who do try and find a way out – such as Redgrave’s character (Davey Fenwick) are viewed with amusement or disdain.  The will to break free has been forced out of most, they continue along a single track like a blinkered pit pony.

Redgrave by @aitchteee

 When the pit is open and working, danger is a constant presence.  The film makes it clear that many were of the opinion that mine owners put profit before lives.  It puts across a firm opinion that only public ownership will make this a safer working environment.  Daily threat of death is accepted as a hazard of earning enough to stay alive – a paradox unacceptable in the modern world. The storyline ends tragically.  True to life for so many families.  Also true to life perhaps is Davey Fenwick’s eventual return to his home village.  Even those that escaped found the world outside just too different to cope with – such was the unique character of a pit village. 

Nationalisation was achieved but it didn’t stop the accidents or the strikes.  What really changed things was the welfare state, which meant that loss of work didn’t lead to cruelly means- tested grinding poverty.  Although the towns and villages where I live and work are still struggling through the closures of two decades ago with some of the highest unemployment rates in the country. This film helped me to see why I shouldn’t have been so bemused when I moved here. Perhaps if I had seen this first I would have been more prepared. 

Since moving here, I have traced my family tree and found that I have some north eastern mining blood. Cornforth and Ferryhill are my ancestral homes, and were probably not that different to the village portrayed in the film, even back in the 19^th century.  I am proud to have this blood – but glad that Great Grandma decided to seek her fortune in the big city and took her hook to Sheffield.  And now I realise just how much I should admire her for breaking free from that setting.  Strange to imagine that I did actually meet her, that this history was just in my grasp as our lives briefly overlapped. Unfortunately, she was so old that she scared me! But it just shows that these terrible lives were not so long ago in the grand scheme of things, which should be much to our shame.


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Appointment With Luck

‘Appointment in London’ (1953) stars Dirk Bogarde as a Wing Commander at a Lincolnshire bomber base.  The action takes place in the summer of 1943.  As you would imagine for a British film of this period, there is a range of familiar looking faces in supporting roles.  Quite often, you can’t put a name to the face, they are just part of your own film landscape.  In this film, one character had an extremely familiar voice, although his face was hitherto unknown to me.  The voice belonged to an Australian character, played by one Bill Kerr.  Any Hancock’s Half Hour-ites out there will know Bill’s Antipodean tones – I must have heard him hundreds of times from the radio shows.  I found it quite fascinating to actually see him, though I kept expecting him to call other characters “Tub”!

This is a serious film, focussing on a group of men who never knew if that day would be their last.  I was half expecting a squadron of stiff upper lips and blithe heroism.  I was pleasantly surprised by the very human portrayal that I saw on the screen.  It gave me the overall impression that these men were obsessed with the concepts of luck and superstition.  At the beginning of the film, Bogarde’s character (Mason) is returning from his 87^th flying mission over enemy territory.  The storyline makes clear just how lucky he is to have reached this point.  In fact he is an anomaly in the statistics.  Mason’s luck weighs heavily on his shoulders and colleagues worry for his health.  There is no logical reason for his survival, it is pure luck and he doesn’t know how to prolong it or when it will run out.  Meanwhile, other characters have their lucky charms, and talk of jinxes is common.  There is even the hint of superstition around the presence of wives and girlfriends.

Bogarde by @aitchteee 

This film demonstrates how important these concepts are to the human when they face an uncertain, pressured existence.  It shows how our irrational beliefs in superstitions and charms stems from a time when life was much less safe than it is today.  It also demonstrates, should we ever forget, just how short a lifespan World War Two aircrews faced.

We should treasure films such as ‘Appointment in London’ as part of our national war archive.  Another thought that this film led me to is that this kind of warfare was quite unique and its existence short-lived.  Aerial warfare was in its infancy in World War One, it was perfected in the Spanish Civil War and used most intensely in World War Two.  But by the end of this conflict, the pilot-less aerial bombardment weapon had been developed.  It was then not the nightly air-raids, but the constant sudden appearance of a V rocket that was to be feared.  So, this window in the lives of bomber crews needs to be kept, as our understanding of their existence and psychology recedes into a past that we can barely comprehend anymore.

To see how this film inspired one of my short stories, see my wordpress blog post: http://sarahmillerwalters.wordpress.com/2013/11/20/keep-writing/

Naval Gazing

Having attempted to trace my family tree, I can confidently assert that I have sea-salt in my blood.  I am descended from a long line of Cornish/Devonian sailors.  We even have a seafaring claim to fame as Jack Crawford – “Hero of the Battle of Camperdown” is apparently a great-times-several uncle.  He even has his own statue in Sunderland and a Wikipedia page – and having read this and how he sold his medal to buy booze I am quite convinced and ready to accept him as one of my own.  More recently, my great uncle was lost on the HMS Prince of Wales, sunk off Singapore in the middle of World War Two.  His memory has resonated down three generations.

But I know that I am not unusual in this – despite my having grown up nowhere near the coast.  We are a small group of islands so it is only natural that many of us have taken to the seas over the centuries.  There has also been a lot of prestige attached to the Royal Navy, which must have made it an attractive proposition to a young man with not much in the way of an interesting future before him, especially in the days before there were planes to fly.  The navy has also been an attractive subject to film-makers, and the service’s Second World War exploits have been well documented.

I recently stumbled across a 1939 film called ‘Sons of the Sea’.  Filmed in lavish colour, this is very obviously a recruitment drive for the impending war.  The storyline mostly takes place at Dartmouth Naval College, and I would guess that permission to film there meant that the film did have official blessing.  Scenes of parades at the college and the beautiful local scenery are deliberately placed to make the hardest of British hearts swell with pride.  There’s a lot here for the vintage transport enthusiast, including some delicious chocolate and cream GWR action.  But there are not that many boats – surprising for a film about navy personnel.  This could be because the film is mainly about the officer class and it is mainly parades and desks.  If this film was an officially blessed recruitment drive, it appears that the navy at this point in time were much more interested in attracting officers than ratings.  They knew that conscription would bring them enough of the general cannon fodder that they needed, but they worked to attract the cream of the middle classes to come and give the orders.

If there is one contemporary navy-themed war film that stands out for me, it is ‘In Which We Serve’. This 1942 film is, in the film’s own words, the story of a ship.  It follows the adventures of the fictional HMS Torrin and its crew – going right across the board from Noel Coward’s upper class captain to John Mills’ salt of the earth cockney.  This too had the blessing of the Ministry of Information, and of course it had to have some sort of feelgood and morale boosting factor about it.  But it does not shy away from reality.  The ship is torpedoed and sailors lose their lives, perhaps illustrating that British audiences wouldn’t have accepted a load of old flannel and the powers that be knew that.   This is good news for us, because we do see some genuine concerns from the time.  I was particularly interested to see the recognition of how modern warfare made life even more difficult for servicemen than it had ever been before.  The bombing of cities by the Luftwaffe meant that for the first time, those serving on board ships had as much cause to worry about their loved ones as vice-versa.  Plymouth, where many naval wives and families lived, was particularly targeted by bombers.  The Chief Petty Officer’s loss of his wife and mother-in-law during a raid in the film was true to life.  Miraculously, John Mills’ wife and unborn child survive, despite being in the same house.  This is where the censors must have stepped in – because countless children and babies were killed in the Plymouth raids.  The death of a pregnant woman must have been deemed too much for contemporary audiences to take, showing us where the morale line was drawn.

Looking at these two films together provides some perspective on how attitudes changed in World War Two.  As Britain approached war, ordinary sailors were not deemed interesting enough to star in a film or worth a lot of effort to recruit.  By 1942 their lives take centre stage in a screenplay written by upper-class aspirational Noel Coward.  At last the efforts of the masses are being recognised, I wonder if this was a sea-change for film? 

But let’s not forget our naval heroes, as depicted in this sort of film. Not those heroes with statues or pubs named after them.  Those whose only memorial is the sea itself, the same sea that defines us as a nation.

This is the last posting for 2013, I'll be back in 2014.  In the meantime, you might like to spend your Christmas break reading my book, Matinee Musings, available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Matinee-Musings-The-History-Usherette-ebook/dp/B00FJ4KY6C

I will also be bringing out a new book of short stories very soon.  Look out for it on my Amazon page - 'Athene and Other Stories' by Sarah Miller Walters.  Publication will be announced on my other blog: http://sarahmillerwalters.wordpress.com/.  Here's an extract to get you in the mood:  

Athene

 Not many of the evacuees wanted to go to Owl Farm.  It was run by the Widow Woolton, a tall and stocky woman whose voice violently ricocheted off the walls of the village hall as she made her selection.  Her husband, Farmer Woolton, had given up his life during the 1939 harvest.  That is, a lot of people said that the incident with the thresher had been suicide.  His wife had patently married him for his farm and it has to be said that she was born to a life dedicated to the country.  Ever since their union, he had declined in strength while hers continually multiplied.  She became expert in new farming methods where he remained novice and she flaunted her skills making him feel less useful by the month.  None of Farmer Woolton’s relatives had dared to claim inheritance of the farm and besides; they were all away with the forces.  Widow Woolton remained in firm control of Owl Farm, and relished the challenge of helping to feed a country at war.

There were several spare rooms at the farmhouse, it being of the tall sash-windowed Georgian type of building.  Land Girls took up some of those, the widow relishing the opportunity to act the part of Amazon Queen over such green young women.  But she had one large bedroom set aside for evacuees, and insisted on having first choice of any healthy looking boys that arrived in the district.  All but the most bravado filled boy shrunk from being selected by Widow Woolton.  Her eyes reminded them of bus headlamps from before the blackout.  When they realised that they were destined for a farm, they knew that they would be put to work, that they has been chosen for their ability to lift and carry. The best that they could make of it was to hope for extra rations.

Getting Away With It

‘Private’s Progress’ (1956) is an interesting film in that it seems to have had a big influence over two other films from the late 1950s.  Produced by the Boulting Brothers, they must have enjoyed making the film and its success.  Much of the cast reappeared in their more famous ‘I’m Alright Jack’ three years later, cast in similar roles.  Also, there are heavy reminders of 1958’s ‘Carry on Sergeant’, with the presence of William Hartnell playing pretty much the same character in both films.

Who's the Sergeant by @aitchteee

 Ian Carmichael plays the useless Private Windrush, whose disastrous progress we follow throughout the film.  Being a posh boy he should of course have been an officer, but his total ineptitude in everything he tries leads to him being shoved in with the masses.  The film is set around 1943-ish – over halfway through the war.  Being a Boulting production there is a heavy element of satire in the story, the target of which is criminal activity.  If we take on board what the film suggests, we can only conclude that wartime crime was rife – that almost everybody was dabbling in something.  Of course we are all aware of the archetypal spiv, but the idea of so many taking part doesn’t sit easily with the idea of noble Britain fighting the good fight as if it were a game of cricket.  As ever, I turned to my wartime bible for answers – that is Juliet Gardiner’s book ‘Wartime Britain 1939 – 1945’.  There are unarguable statistics which back up ‘Private’s Progress’’ insinuation that crime was indeed rife.  By 1945, crime was up 57% on the 1939 statistics. To some extent this was because there were more crimes to commit under wartime legislation.  Circumstances also provided a lot of new opportunities – for example the blackout leading to an increase in theft, and bombing leading to a shameful explosion of looting.

Richard Attenborough’s character, Cox, has all the scams and delightfully shares them with anyone who’ll listen.  We particularly learn how to get away with making a railway journey without paying for a ticket.  It does seem to be the case that the railways did suffer greatly from the crimewave – and not just in terms of non fare paying passengers.  According to a book published by the LMS in 1946, detailing its role in World War Two, theft from the company ranged from a huge amount of petty pilfering to organised raids on warehouses.  Some gangs took full advantage of the confusion and panic caused by air raids to loot railway property while bombs fell around them.  So, railways were a good choice to focus on and allowed the film to avoid getting too heavy.  Not all petty crime was amusing, as many of Gardiner’s looting accounts attest.

‘Private’s Progress’ also points out that this increase in crime or opportunism wasn’t just taking place among the lower classes.  And it suggests that the higher you stood in society, the bigger and better the opportunity.  There is, however, not as much solid information to be had on crime among the elite.  Not surprising – the rich were always more likely to get away with their misdemeanours.  The class system is shown up as the biggest accomplice that there ever was.

Frankie Says...

‘The Lady is a Square’ (1959) is Anna Neagle’s final film, made just before she retired from the screen in favour of the stage.  Although not one of the greats, this film is certainly a pleasant way to fill 90 minutes.  Neagle is supported by a host of familiar faces including Wilfred Hyde-White, Frankie Vaughn, Janette Scott and Antony Newley.  All give a solid performance of an engaging storyline.

I found the story of particular resonance because of a book that I had just finished reading.  That is David Kynaston’s “Modernity Britain – Opening the box 1957 -1959.”  This exceptionally readable history book describes how Britain had begun to shake off austerity and lay the foundations of a country that we would recognise today.  ‘The Lady is a Square’ could also, in a much more simplistic way, tell us something about this transitional period.  Although Kynaston’s work is more rigorous and far-reaching, contemporary film is like a message in a bottle sent to us from that period of history itself.

The note inside this bottle would tell us that this is the point when talent began to take precedence over name.  Neagle plays Mrs Baring, the “old money”; she has taken over the running of her late husband’s orchestra and knows all the right names.  She and her daughter (Janette Scott) live in a fashionable townhouse and have servants.  However, it soon becomes apparent that this is a financial façade.  The bills are unpaid and it transpires that the overdraft is big.  Her world is on the brink of collapse.

 

Anna by @aitchteee

Of course it is Frankie Vaughn who saves her, after becoming smitten with her daughter.  He is a fledgling rock singer, and when his career takes off it is his money that bails out the Barings and the orchestra.  It is only when Neagle joins in with the “kids” on the dancefloor that you know her future has been secured.  She couldn’t beat them so she joined them.

This has to be a reflection of the general feeling of the time.  Old money was out of fashion.  The rich were being taxed to oblivion (there is a direct reference to this in the film).  If they were to keep up their lifestyles then they had to join the modern world and diversify their act.  The old guard were losing influence.  People were beginning to take notice of rock stars, film stars and entrepreneurs, who were a great deal more interesting to look at and to listen to.  Cliff was in the Hit Parade and The Beatles were on their way.  This film gives us a snapshot of this actually happening.

Don’t Envy Jim

‘Lucky Jim’ (1957) is based on the novel of the same name by Kingsley Amis.  As is usual with films derived from famous novels, it presents a much abridged version of the story.  Any attempt at analysing the film as a historical resource would therefore be a shadow of what could be gleaned by analysing the book instead.  There may be some visuals that provide incidental information – car types, railway scenes or fashions for example.  But Amis meant this story to be a document of its time and it deliberately lays into the education and class systems.  This isn’t a literary criticism blog.  I had enough of that to last me a lifetime when I did A Level in English Literature.  Blimey, if I never see “The Grapes of Wrath” again it’ll be too soon. Anyway, I’m sure many intelligent people have made a much better go of analysing the literary ‘Lucky Jim’ than I have the capability or inclination to.

But, as a student of history, there was one particular scene which caught my attention.  Towards the end of the film, Jim Dixon (Ian Carmichael) drunkenly rebels against being forced to deliver a history lecture that has been prepared by his boss, Professor Welch.  The lecture is on the subject of “Merrie England”, and it paints the English Middle Ages as a golden age of music and dance.  Anyone can see that this is a heavily biased view of a period that for most people was nasty, brutish and short.  It goes completely against Jim’s principles to deliver this “bunkum” and Professor Welch is shown as being completely out of touch with modern academic study.  This caught my interest because, 60 + years on, we still struggle against an often over-romantic view of history.  But now, we are over-romanticising the period in which ‘Jim’ was written and filmed.

Ian Carmichael as Lucky Jim by @aitchteee

The current craze for vintage, which seems to centre on the 1950s – from fashion to music styles to home baking - has in no doubt been initiated by the often overwhelming pressure of modern life.  But as we hark back we are selective.  We seem to imagine the 1950s as a golden era, sandwiched between austerity and psychedelia, when everyone had a job and knew their place.  Where everything was stylishly designed and built to last.  We conveniently forget that those cosy coal fires caused deadly smogs, that those chromed up cars caused carnage on the roads, that too many people lived in slums and didn’t have access to an inside toilet never mind the latest furniture designs. Look at ‘Lucky Jim’ itself for evidence that the 1950s were not so golden.  Despite the advent of grammar schools, introduced to give the intelligent from the lower classes a hand up, the class system still exerted a toughened glass ceiling.  You were judged on your voice, on your school and on your clothes.  Womens’ roles are only supportive and their presence in academia is treated as a joke.

As the film might have been subtitled: We never learn, do we?

Gravy Trains

‘Two Way Stretch’ (1960) should be listed among British cinema classics.  It stars Peter Sellers – a man whose work is much picked over and discussed.  Personally, I really like to see this film because of Bernard Cribbins, perfectly cast in the role of Lenny the Dip.  I particularly like the scene when his screen mother, played by Irene Handl, visits him in the prison where much of the film is set.  Having caused raised eyebrows when her shopping bag breaks to release a torrent of tools (“Ain’t you ever seen a home perm kit before, Officer?”) she then goes on to berate her son for bringing shame on the family by not attempting to escape.  Lenny’s sister is played by Liz Fraser in one of her best film roles.  I always think it a shame that Irene and Liz’s turns as a crooked mother and daughter were never reprised in a further film.  They are a brilliant double act, but I presume that, being female, they were not thought able to carry a feature on their own merits.  Another sterling turn is delivered by Wilfred Hyde-White as Soapy Stevens, a part that was surely written with him in mind.

Hyde White by @aitchteee

An added cast attraction for me is seeing “Our Thorley” (as we always refer to him) in action.  Thorley Walters is one of those bit-part actors that appeared in a lot of films in the 1950s and 60s. I often wonder if we have a common ancestor, as he was from Devon and my Walters roots are firmly in Devon and Somerset.  It would be rather wonderful to have a classic British film connection in the family tree.

A perfect cast then, and some very funny lines as part of a nail-biting storyline.  ‘Two Way Stretch’ is a shining example of how well we used to make films.  However, on my recent viewing, I found something rather melancholy about the final scenes of the film.  A sense that we really are losing our way in some respects.  It begins when the newly released prisoners arrive at the railway station – possibly Paddington although I’m not completely sure.  But as a comparison with a modern mainline station it certainly comes off best.  The station looks grander, neater, less cluttered with signs and advertisements.   There are advertising posters, but these are the classic artistic depictions of Western Region destinations, tastefully situated.  When I stand on my local station, all I can see are adverts – every available space filled in with in-your-face clever-clever selling.  Of course every bit of the railway is going to be given over to commercialism now that they are privately run, and the sole purpose is to make money rather than run an efficient transport system.

Once the gang are on the train – with a sackful of stolen diamonds, they are able to have a quiet compartment to themselves.  A much more civilised way of travel over the crammed cattle-class carriages of today.  Fearing that they have been rumbled, Lenny is sent up onto the train roof with the diamonds.  Inevitably, the sack of loot ends up being collected on one of those lineside nets that used to collect sacks of mail.  There again is a reminder of something else lost to the modern world.  Mail trains are already a thing of the past, and now the Royal Mail itself is being sold off to greedy people who already owned it.  This isn’t just nostalgia that the film brought out in me, but sadness that we now live in a society where everything is a commodity and nothing is a service.  A service that, if it was run properly by far-sighted people, could really do something positive for the economy.  

How very apt that those thoughts were brought to me by a film about thieves.