From Steam to Screen: Cinema, the Railways and Modernity 9781786723222, 9781784539153, 9781786733221

Citation preview

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Rebecca Harrison is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. She received her PhD from University College London (UCL), and has presented her research in peer-​reviewed journals and at conferences internationally.

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‘From Steam to Screen uses an extraordinarily productive thematic structure to draw out the myriad of interconnections between cinema, modernity and the railways. Covering class, gender, travel, empire, space and time, Harrison’s compelling analysis keeps film at the centre yet incorporates a number of issues of wider cultural and historical significance. The book is simply a first-rate, fast-track way into understanding how both cinema and the railways affected people’s lives at key moments in the last century.’ – Sarah Street, University of Bristol ‘Harrison’s important study reveals the entwined histories of the railway and cinema in the early British twentieth century. She explores, using rich archival research, how cinema allows us to access neglected spaces and narratives of the past, uncovering the experiences of women, children and other historically marginalised groups. A fascinating read.’ – Michael Williams, University of Southampton

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Cinema and Society series General Editor: Jeffrey Richards Acting for the Silent Screen: Film Actors and Aspiration between the Wars Chris O’Rourke

China and the Chinese in Popular Film: From Fu Manchu to Charlie Chan Jeffrey Richards

The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain Jeffrey Richards

Christmas at the Movies: Images of Christmas in American, British and European Cinema Edited by Mark Connelly

Banned in the USA: British Films in the United States and their Censorship, 1933–1960 Anthony Slide Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present Anthony Aldgate & Jeffrey Richards Beyond a Joke: Parody in English Film and Television Comedy Neil Archer Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema Colin McArthur Britain Can Take It: British Cinema in the Second World War Tony Aldgate & Jeffrey Richards The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945 James Chapman British Children’s Cinema: From the Thief of Bagdad to Wallace and Gromit Noel Brown British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus Tony Shaw

The Classic French Cinema 1930–1960 Colin Crisp The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western Michael Coyne The Death Penalty in American Cinema: Criminality and Retribution in Hollywood Film Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan Distorted Images: British National Identity and Film in the 1920s Kenton Bamford The Euro-Western: Reframing Gender, Race and the ‘Other’ in Film Lee Broughton An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory Annette Kuhn Family Films in Global Cinema: The World Beyond Disney Edited by Noel Brown and Bruce Babington Femininity in the Frame: Women and 1950s British Popular Cinema Melanie Bell

British Film Design: A History Laurie N. Ede

Film and Community in Britain and France: From La Règle du jeu to Room at the Top Margaret Butler

Children, Cinema and Censorship: From Dracula to the Dead End Kids Sarah J. Smith

Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany Richard Taylor

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 The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s Charles Drazin

The New Scottish Cinema Jonathan Murray

Frank Capra’s Eastern Horizons: American Identity and the Cinema of International Relations Elizabeth Rawitsch

Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film James Chapman

From Moscow to Madrid: European Cities, Postmodern Cinema Ewa Mazierska & Laura Rascaroli From Steam to Screen: Cinema, the Railways and Modernity Rebecca Harrison Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain: From the 1920s to the Present Mark Glancy The Hollywood Family Film: A History, from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter Noel Brown Hollywood Genres and Postwar America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies and Film Noir Mike Chopra-Gant Hollywood Riots: Violent Crowds and Progressive Politics in American Film Doug Dibbern Hollywood’s History Films David Eldridge Hollywood’s New Radicalism: War, Globalisation and the Movies from Reagan to George W. Bush Ben Dickenson Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films James Chapman

Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces Andrew Moor Projecting Tomorrow: Science Fiction and Popular Cinema James Chapman & Nicholas J. Cull Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945 David Welch Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, History and American National Identity Jenny Barrett Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone Christopher Frayling Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster Geoff King Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema Andrew Spicer The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1929–1939 Edited by Jeffrey Richards Withnail and Us: Cult Films and Film Cults in British Cinema Justin Smith

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FROM STEAM TO SCREEN Cinema, the Railways and Modernity REBECCA HARRISON

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Published in 2018 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright © 2018 Rebecca Harrison The right of Rebecca Harrison to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. Cinema and Society Series ISBN: 978 1 78453 915 3 eISBN: 978 1 78672 322 2 ePDF: 978 1 78673 322 1 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Additional Acknowledgements General Editor’s Introduction Introduction Intersections Space and Time Approaching the Past

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1 Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class at the Cinematograph Show Ghosts in Victorian Culture The Phantom Aesthetics of Early Cinema Class and the ‘Panicking Audience’ Phantom Rides and Rural Modernity Railways and Countryside Cinematograph Shows Conclusion

27 30 38 42 48 55 65



2 Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict in the First World War The Ambulance Train Visual Culture in the First World War The Ambulance Train on Screen A Shared Vocabulary Conclusion

69 73 82 90 96 104



3 Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman The ‘Modern’ Woman Dangerous Machines Precarious Women

109 114 122 129

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Contents Precarious Modern Women and Onscreen Machines Conclusion

135 146



4 Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity in the Second World War The (in)Visible Child in Urban and Rural Spaces Child Evacuees as Railway Tourists The Movie House and Making a ‘Home from Home’ Film Exhibition and Children’s Spectatorship Conclusion

149 152 160 167 178 184



5 The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire The Emergence of the Movie Coach Inside the Cinema Train The Cinema Train’s Afterlife Conclusion

187 190 203 218 226

Epilogue

229

Notes Bibliography Index

239 285 295

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List of Illustrations I.1 Vicky Paige and Boris Lermentov meet inside a railway carriage in The Red Shoes (The Archers, 1948).

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1.1 The eponymous ‘countryman’ is scared by the oncoming, onscreen train in The Countryman and the Cinematograph (R W Paul, 1901).

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1.2 The railway, a symbol of modernity, stretches into a rural environment and so collapses the distance between urban and pastoral space in Metropolitan Railway (1910).

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1.3 A cartoon in World’s Fair reveals that new technology was just as important at countryside shows as in the metropolis. See World’s Fair, ‘Chronophone,’ March 30, 1907.

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2.1 Architects’ drawing of passenger rolling stock being converted to an ambulance train. Detail from Railway News, ‘War Department Ambulance Trains as Arranged from the Existing L&SWR’s Stock,’ August 30, 1914.

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2.2 The pervasive whiteness of the war as displayed in advertising for Benger’s Food. See Illustrated London News, ‘Benger’s Food,’ July 13, 1918.

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3.1 Joan travels down the outside of the train as she attempts to thwart the villain in The Flying Scotsman (British International Pictures, 1929).

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3.2 Nora is bundled inside the train like a parcel by the male gangsters in Number Seventeen (Associated British Picture Corp., 1932).

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3.3 Miss Froy writes her name on the window/screen to communicate with Iris in The Lady Vanishes (Gainsborough Pictures, 1938).

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4.1 A child eats her packed lunch – apparently enjoying a holiday-like trip – on an evacuee train in the British Movietone newsreel item Children Go Happily (1939).

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List of Illustrations 4.2 Alice confronts a confusing spectacle in Alice in Wonderland (Paramount, 1933), in which the seemingly exciting world beyond the looking-glass/screen came to represent the city during the conflict.

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4.3 Evacuee children at Stoneleigh Abbey prepare to watch a selection of films designed to prevent them running back to the city and the lure of the urban movie theatre. See Coventry Herald, ‘Films for Stoneleigh Evacuees,’ September 23, 1939.

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5.1 Passengers wait for a show to start in the silver-panelled LNER-Pathé movie coach, c.1937. Image courtesy of the National Railway Museum.

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5.2 A cinema attendant (possibly Mr Stanley) sells tickets for an LNER-Pathé cinema carriage screening inside the train, c.1937. Image courtesy of the National Railway Museum.

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5.3 An extant programme for the LNER-Pathé cinema train dated May 1938. Image courtesy of the National Archives.

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5.4 Laura in Brief Encounter (Cineguild, 1945) stares at both the passing landscape and her image as it is projected onto the carriage window, which recalls the function of the cinema train. 221

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Acknowledgements In these acknowledgements I want to prioritise the typically overlooked, wonderful women who have given me emotional strength and intellectual courage every time I’ve struggled with this research project over the past seven years. I  owe completing this book to my relationships with these extraordinary women, and dedicate it to them and all the women out there who have ever for one moment doubted their ability because of their gender. A huge thank you to Lizzie Lay for the fabulous cover design (and the best friendship I could have asked for). Thanks to Becca Davies for her brilliant copy editing skills and always knowing where to find the best cocktails. Also thanks to Maddy Hamey-​Thomas at I.B.Tauris for her help and advice. Another huge thank you to my mum/​s Jane and Rose, my sisters, Maddie, Josie and Louisa, my nan, Pam, and all the friends who have supported me (Sam, Shira and Dej, to name but a few). Thank you to the inspiring colleagues (Hannah, Eylem, Amy, Lisa, Mel –​again, the list is long) who’ve become good friends and encouraged me when starting new jobs, moving home and navigating the often intimidating world of academia. A big thanks to my many critical friends, in particular Karen, whose feedback has been invaluable and whose time and thoughtful comments I always appreciated. Also, thank you to all my teachers and mentors. To Mrs Holly, who told me aged eight that she was looking forward to one day reading my book. And to Jann and Mandy for telling me I could do this, and encouraging me to pursue this career. In the third year of my undergraduate degree I hadn’t ever considered that I could be an academic. Thank you both for giving me the confidence to stick at it, and for the invaluable research skills

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Acknowledgements you taught me. Without your interventions, this book wouldn’t have been written. And finally… to the men. Thank you to Lee and Richard, my long-​ suffering but always insightful and helpful PhD supervisors. Thank you to my dad/​s, Ralph and Ritchie, and many friends (Sam, Todd, and the Bearsted and Downswood people in particular) for your support and unwavering ability to make me laugh. Thanks to Lawrence for encouraging me to actually submit my book proposal, and to other male friends and colleagues who have helped me create a space for myself in academia (and to David for your feedback on the manuscript). And last, but by no means least, to my granddad, Percy, who I have no doubt would never have read this book, but would without fail have told me to ‘mind how I go’. I’ll certainly try.

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Additional Acknowledgements Chapter Two is a revised version of an article entitled ‘Writing History on the Page and Screen: Mediating Conflict through Britain’s First World War Ambulance Trains,’ which first appeared in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 35, no. 4 (2015): 559–​578. The interviews with projectionists in Chapter Three appear thanks to the BECTU History Project. Copyright is vested in the British Entertainment History Project: www.historyproject.org.uk. Chapter Four is a revised version of an article entitled ‘Inside the Cinema Train: Britain, Empire and Modernity in the Twentieth Century,’ which was originally published in Film History 26, no.4 (2014): 32–​57. The research for this monograph was made possible by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

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General Editor’s Introduction The railways and the cinema have been closely linked cultural phenomena. The railways have featured in every kind of film from dramatic features to documentaries and newsreels, resulting in such fondly remembered productions as The Ghost Train, Night Mail, The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. As Rebecca Harrison argues in this book, both railways and cinema were vital to the nation’s experience of modernity. Three continuing themes structure the book as she explores the impact of these technologies on everyday life, the nature of the modernity revealed and the links with discourses on class, gender and empire. Paradoxically while cinema and railways assisted the expansion of democracy and mass consumption, both trains and cinemas maintained class divisions in their seating and accommodation. But Harrison argues that there was greater fluidity both in the personal and the communal, interior and exterior experience than has usually been acknowledged. While the timespan covered by the book is principally 1895 to 1948, Harrison focuses on a number of defined topics to illustrate her analysis. She looks at the myth of ‘panicking audiences’ in early cinema by analysing how different audiences understood the image of the onrushing train. She intriguingly contextualises audience reactions to their experience of ghost stories and fairground rides. She examines fears of mechanisation through the experience of ambulance trains between 1914 and 1918 and their role in the visual culture of the Great War. She looks at how women inhabited and were represented in railway carriages and cinemas, in particular how women were imperilled by train crashes and cinema fires. She examines the effect of both the urban and rural environment on Second World War child evacuees and the transformative effect on them of railway journeys and films. Finally she explores the links of cinema, railway and empire through the role of cinema trains principally between 1924 and xiv

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General Editor’s Introduction 1939. The whole book adds up to a fascinating and thought-provoking study of a hitherto neglected dimension of the history both of the railways and the cinema. Jeffrey Richards

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Introduction

Crossing back and forth between the UK and the south of France as their tempestuous relationship first dissolves, then is re-​ established, dance impresario Boris Lermontov and ballerina Vicky Page make frequent use of the train in The Red Shoes (1948).1 Europe’s extensive rail network enables them to leave in haste and return on time for shows, and facilitates their frenzied mobility in a speeded-​up world where dancers whirl ever faster across the stage and between cities on their tours. Train carriages also provide Lermontov and Vicky with moving sets in which their theatrical encounters, predicated on their consuming passions for dance and spectacle, are played out on screen. The train in The Red Shoes, then, encapsulates both the railway and cinema’s status in British culture as mediators of modernity that whisked people between distant, urban sites that became closer through new technological networks and simultaneously facilitated exhibition in a world increasingly reliant on visual display. Moreover, the two technologies in the film speak of anxieties about mechanisation that pervaded British society from the industrial revolution to the mid-​ twentieth century. For together, locomotives and trick photography propel Vicky into a nightmare performance of intensifying hurry. Unable to stop dancing and return to her normal, routine pace, she eventually dances into

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From Steam to Screen the path of an oncoming train, and so the railway and her desire for visible, public recognition both accelerate her career, and lead to her untimely end. As well as alluding to the train and cinema’s impact on how people in Britain travelled and experienced modern technologies, The Red Shoes also emphasises the long and interwoven histories of locomotives and screen media. In a remark that knowingly refers to a rich corpus of British rail films, Lermontov suggests to Vicky that they are ‘destined to always meet at railway stations’ (see Figure I.1). Like hundreds of characters before them, in actualités, newsreels and fictions, shorts, documentaries and features, the pair cross paths on platforms and in carriages; in cinema and other visual media, the train connoted the nation’s technological advancement and the cultural changes wrought by mass consumption. Between 1895 and 1948, British media were fascinated by the technological transformations of modernity. Films, newspapers, illustrations and literature told stories about technology that astonished the senses, from locomotives breaking land-​speed records and moving images springing into life on screen, to the wreckage of train crashes and the disaster of cinema fires. And, in

Figure I.1  Vicky Paige and Boris Lermentov meet inside a railway carriage

in The Red Shoes (The Archers, 1948).

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Introduction narratives about mechanisation and empire, the railway and the cinema were especially prominent. The two technologies both manipulated time and space, while in the auditorium or at the station, passengers and spectators were sold new ways of seeing and moving –​indeed, the carriage and the auditorium commoditised an experience that made movement visual.2 As a result, the railways and cinema radically transformed everyday life for people in Britain by materially altering how people interacted with the world. During the period between 1895 (the birth of cinema) and 1948 (when Britain’s railways were nationalised), rail and film were vital to the nation’s experience of modernity. The train and cinema created actual and vicarious tourists in an expanding leisure industry, radically altered vision and movement, and, to an extent, improved social mobility. In examining the significance of historical and intersecting rail and cinema spaces, this book asks three main questions. First, how did the technologies intervene in people’s everyday lives? Second, what does the convergence of the railway and cinema reveal about Britain’s modernity? And third, how are the histories of the train and film connected to broader discourses about class, gender and empire in the period? To answer these questions, I rely on extensive archival and material evidence, including films, personal testimonies, government records and the daily press, to argue that moving images evoke the railway spaces of the past, and so offer us visual and archival records of transport history. In doing so, I interrogate the connections between specific train and cinema spaces and a historical narrative concerned with various cultural and national identities. Throughout the book, then, I draw on an extensive range of archival sources to foreground the experiences of passengers and spectators through both their encounters with rail and film technologies, and the various ways that they inhabited carriages and movie theatres. As such, the work offers British cinema historians new insights into specific audiences (including women and the working classes), and uncovers previously overlooked histories of film apparatuses and exhibition spaces, such as temporary rural screenings for wartime child evacuees, and the mobile movie coach. The intertwined narrative of the train and the moving image also provokes a 3

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From Steam to Screen reinvestigation of the identity politics at stake in the period, including those of gender, class, and democratic reform. Thus Steam to Screen repositions British cinema in the first half of the twentieth century in a broader narrative about industrialisation –​a connection explored in scholarship on specific cultural manifestations of modernity in the United States and Germany, yet without the same focused exploration in Britain –​and reveals the myriad ways that people consumed the moving image according to their social status.3 By paying close attention to media consumers, the book intervenes in scholarly debates about modernity by offering a new feminist critique of ‘mass’ consumption. On the one hand, I demonstrate how cinema and the railway, which are paradigms for experiences of mass media and consumption in an expanding public sphere, enlarged the visible world for different demographics of people. On the other, I challenge notions of homogeneity that often arise from histories of mass production by situating cinemagoing and rail travel within networks of power (for example, patriarchy, class, imperialism and urbanism) that operated to circumscribe people’s interactions with their expanded lived environment. Of course, the historic intersections between locomotives and projectors (in both figurative and physical senses) are well documented, and scholars have paid particular attention to the railway’s influence on cinema in Film Studies.4 The train’s impact on genre, distribution, filmic language, production and representation has long informed the field.5 But, so far, histories of British film, which have acknowledged various iterations of cinema’s intermediality, have not considered how motion pictures materially contributed to shaping the nation’s experience of modernity. Moreover, scholarship more broadly has overlooked how crucial moving images and the railways were in altering the lives of ordinary people at a time when going to the movies and taking the train were everyday activities, for rail and cinema were the nation’s dominant mass media.6 In 1928, passenger numbers reached 1,300 million, while moviegoers purchased 1,027 million cinema tickets in 1940.7 Based on these figures, every person in Britain took approximately twenty-​nine train journeys and bought twenty-​one film tickets per year at peak levels.8 As such, the railway and cinema, which signified the nation’s industrial prowess, were also embedded in people’s 4

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Introduction daily routines, and so simultaneously represented both the extraordinary and the mundane. Owing to the technologies’ fluctuating positions in the public imagination as new and yet normal, and mechanical yet comfortable, often domestic-​like environments, the train and movie theatre connote the peculiarities of Britain’s industrialisation. Trains and cinema, therefore, provide a framework through which to investigate modernity and an emerging leisure economy predicated on mass consumption. By referring to ‘modernity,’ I am broadly referring to a historical period during which mechanisation and commoditisation materially and ontologically altered space and time. While historians tend to dispute the exact periodisation, I determine Britain’s as beginning in 1825, when the first passenger train was introduced, and ending in 1948, because emphasis shifted from technological innovation through private enterprise to more advanced public services in attempts to rebuild the nation’s post-​ war infrastructures.9 Also, given that different nations, groups, and individuals experienced industrialisation in specific ways depending on the technologies available to them, I am referring in the British context to a very particular notion of modernity. In their work on mechanisation and mass consumption in Britain, Bernhard Rieger and Martin Daunton propose that owing to discourses about industrial decline in the late nineteenth and early t​ wentieth centuries, historians have tended to resist thinking about modernity in a British context.10 They contend that people in Britain did, nevertheless, conceive of cultural changes as ‘modern’. Whereas in Germany or the United States such transformations were configured as ruptures that created breaks between the past and present, in Britain they were founded on tensions between continuity and discontinuity.11 Building on their argument, and evidence about people’s encounters with rail and cinema architectures, I argue that simultaneity is essential to understanding the period in British culture. Just as train and film technologies signified the astonishing and the routine, and the industrial and domestic, so too they were sites that were public and private, traditional and innovative, and accommodating of movement and stillness. In Britain, where frictions between maintaining the empire and self-​projecting technological and social progression 5

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From Steam to Screen persisted throughout the period, modernity was underpinned by fluctuations rather than fractures, where both/​and applied, rather than either/​or. While this book focuses on how the railway and cinema transformed life in Britain, there is scholarship that takes a similar starting point with regard to the USA and France.12 In her work on representations of railway journeys in early cinema, Lynne Kirby establishes aesthetic and mechanical connections between film and railway histories, proposing that early cinema should be seen in relation to other ‘apparatuses of modernity’.13 Although the work is not comparative, she also contends that the onscreen train is metonymic for wider cultural issues in the United States and France because railways and cinema are conceived as ‘vehicles for national identity’ based on consumption.14 However, despite arguing that the intersections between the locomotive and the cinema are socio-​ politically significant, Kirby’s argument is predicated entirely on representation. She reads the onscreen train as metaphor: for her, the space of representation does not inform us about, or connect to, the materiality of the past. While she offers a comprehensive account of the technologies’ intersecting histories, her psychoanalytic interpretations of railway films are disconnected from physical experiences, and she does not consider how actual passengers and spectators encountered either railway or cinematic space and time. In focusing on people’s actual encounters with industrial technologies, such as railway carriages and cinema apparatuses, I investigate the ways that modernity augmented how people both moved through and looked at the world as consumers. Consequently, this book emerges from scholarship that centres on embodied experiences of space and time. For example, Liz Conor, in her work on women’s visibility in 1920s Australian culture, relies on a definition of modernity that ‘emphasises the alteration of human perception’.15 She stresses the importance of optical technologies (for example, cinema) and the interplay between seeing and being seen in public space.16 Her definition is valuable in that it draws attention to the rise of visual culture in modernity; however, her conception does not consider mobility. I argue that how one moved was crucial to modernity because one did not just look and exist to be looked at: one’s whole body travelled through, performed in, and negotiated space. Even pictorial 6

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Introduction technologies like cinema were intrinsically spatial, as movement was made visual on screen. Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s examination of the railway’s impact on British culture also makes frequent references to the physical, as well as the visual, alterations that took place in the nineteenth century.17 The rail network dissected landscapes with cuttings, embankments and viaducts, and so changed both the appearance and the topography of the nation. In addition, the train affected the human body, with fears about mechanised, speeded-​up travel manifested in medical conditions such as ‘railway spine.’18 Technology’s impact on people’s ability to comprehend space and time were fundamental to modernity, with railways, telephones, typewriters and cinema all regulating the temporality of travel and communication by speeding up or slowing down human activities. Stephen Kern argues that anxieties about haste, which were a characteristic of mechanisation, were due to what he calls ‘an energy crisis […] of abundance’.19 Life was so speeded up that people did not have time to respond to the changes taking place around them; for some, modernity arrived too quickly.20 Richard Sennett also suggests that in an increasingly networked world, speed generated ruptures, for ‘nineteenth-​century [i]‌ndividualism and the facts of speed together deaden[ed] the modern body; it [did] not connect’.21 Electric light turned night into day. Radio dematerialised mass communication. Cinema offered a spatial record of time that changed the recording of history. The sudden speed of the train and the disembodied voice on the telephone were inexplicable: such technological encounters were without referents, and so people suffered the shock of the new. Whether on the railway or in the cinema, the processes of speeding up, travelling through, or condensing time and space were sold by operators to whomsoever could afford to purchase admission. And through buying access to new machines (for example, trains or telegraphs) or purchasing technology to use in the home (typewriters and telephones) users experienced new ways of moving and looking. Space and time were commodities, and valuable ones. Space, at least in a colonial context, was fast running out: Kern proposes that ‘[w]‌estern historians began to ponder the concept of “empty space,” as their nations discovered that none was left [… as] the dominant world powers had finished taking the vast “open” spaces 7

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From Steam to Screen of Africa and Asia’.22 Time was also recoded as a product that was bought and sold. Workers were paid for their time and spent their earnings filling their holidays with leisure activities. However, unlike space, time was more abundant as mechanisation in the workplace increased the possibilities for leisure.23 The era’s growing leisure industry was symptomatic of modernity’s commoditisation of space and time. Holidays made use of private time in what were often public spaces. Trains provided a network for workers who were turned into holidaymakers. Tourist companies appropriated the shipping lines that were established to serve trade across the empire, and sold foreign holidays to the public as both a cultured and enlightened activity.24 Travel journalism, which grew in popularity as people’s income for leisure increased, represented the holiday as simultaneously exotic and a home-​ away-​from-​home that maintained the creature comforts of domesticity. Holidaymakers were near and yet also far away in a modernist conceptualisation of reduced and expanded space.25 But visiting distant lands was not the preserve of travellers on public, or in private, transport, as cinema also enabled viewers to vicariously journey abroad. The movie industry was in the same business as the railways, for it, too, turned people into tourists, and both the cinema and rail network –​which had changed the experience of time and space in the nineteenth century –​continued to transform life in the twentieth by contributing to new industrial practices centred on leisure pursuits. Thus modernity radically altered not only how looking and moving were conceived, but also the material ways that people spent their time and money. As well as registering transformations to British culture brought about by mechanisation and commoditisation, the technologies’ popularisation and eventual waning in public affection reflect the nation’s broader history throughout the period. In fifty-​three years, the nation witnessed five monarchs’ reigns, two world conflicts and industrial decline that had begun in the nineteenth century and exacerbated after the Second World War. By 1948, Britain was in debt to the USA, faced wars with colonies demanding independence from empire, and was, argues Lee Grieveson, ‘clearly a fading geopolitical force.’26 The nation was transformed from a leading imperial power to a secondary international influence, which weakened 8

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Introduction both economic growth and claims of modernity. However, despite such setbacks, Britain did experience improved quality of life and people had more opportunities to access public spaces with better political rights.27 By exploring the intersections of inclusive, yet divisive, train and movie theatre spaces, material evidence emerges that makes tangible Britain’s complicated social and political trajectory during the period.

Intersections Throughout the era of the railway and cinema’s popularisation and slow decline, capitalism was fundamental to changing industrial practices that included the growth of advertising and tourism in the nineteenth century, and the production of mass consumables for the home in the 1920s. The transformations wrought on British society by capitalism were central to modernity because the machines and mass consumables that flowed through capitalist networks altered people’s mobility and perception.28 Exploring the intersections between mechanisation and consumption enables us to comprehend the rail and film industries’ impacts on the nation. And, I argue, examining how different groups of people accessed capitalist networks is imperative in understanding social intersections between gender, race, class and other determinants of identity in British culture. The five chapters within the book present case studies that challenge what I call the ‘myth of mass consumption’ by exploring how access to space was often limited for people under a capitalist system predicated on patriarchy and imperialism. The train and the cinema were both products of mass production, and contributed to the expansion of mass consumption and mass communication, at two different historical moments. Locomotives, built in the first-​wave industrial revolution, transformed the movement of goods and people and so contributed to the expansion of capitalist networks, and the train set in motion industrial, social and political changes made manifest in cinema. Film was a creation of second-​wave industrialisation (which was a revolution reliant on chemicals and electricity rather than coal and steam) and was conducive to a more leisure-​based economy. Nonetheless, there were similarities between the two technologies. In both the carriage 9

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From Steam to Screen and the movie theatre, one submitted to the bodily experience of commoditised, mediated moving and looking. One also travelled on either actual or vicarious journeys.29 Moreover, the railway and the movie theatre depended on more and more people participating in the processes of economic exchange. Inside the carriage and the auditorium, all patrons ostensibly were equal because inclusivity led to the greatest monetary returns for business owners. Even the visible, spatial divisions between passengers and spectators into different classes was determined by how much money a customer paid for a ticket rather than any rigid adherence to maintaining social hierarchies. Cinema’s emergence, in particular, was linked to visual media’s proliferation in the late ​nineteenth and early ​twentieth centuries –​variously described as ‘spectacle,’ ‘surface culture,’ and ‘spectacularisation’ –​which enabled ideas, as well as goods, to be consumed.30 Janet Ward, in her work on Weimar Germany, contends that modernity gave rise to ‘surface culture’ as ‘content yielded to form, text to image, depth to façade’.31 Surface culture valued aesthetics as the primary means of communication in a world increasingly filled by mechanically reproduced images, as neon signs, billboards and department store window displays commoditised the visual. Alongside films and train journeys, newspapers, photography and advertising all offered people new visions of the world. Posters taught spectators about the products on offer in local department stores, while newsreels gave audiences unprecedented visual access to subjects including royalty, war and sporting events. As the instances of visual information increased, so too did the public’s capacity to comment on, participate in, and influence British culture. The cinema and the train contributed to forming a more equal society through expanding access both to new sights and more inclusive public spaces. Challenging discourses about egalitarianism, scholars including Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Guy Debord contend that mass visual culture is a means by which people are controlled in ­capitalist economies.32 However, Debord, and Adorno and Horkheimer, fail to acknowledge that ‘the masses’ are implicated in producing images, and constituted groups of both similar and dissimilar people that responded differently to visual culture. For example, Adorno separates ordinary people 10

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Introduction from modes of production, and perpetuates elitist stereotypes in his distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ –​or rather, mass –​art.33 Furthermore, in Debord’s assertion that spectacle creates an absolute illusion of power (‘false consciousness’), he undermines his argument that ‘man himself produces all the details of his world.’34 The systems they describe do not account for ordinary people and their daily interactions with vision and power, nor for divergent experiences. As Michel de Certeau proposes, individuals’ appropriations of the products of mass culture are unique: films are watched, newspapers read, and streets traversed in a variety of ways.35 By extension, I contend that spectacle is representation, and so is open to numerous interpretations that alter the signifying image depending on a person’s point of view. To expand Britain’s capitalist economy, it was necessary that the state intervened in improving living conditions and equality for citizens to ensure that they could participate in consuming goods. As such, the railway’s popularisation in the nineteenth century coincided with a shift in political will that saw the first, albeit tentative, steps towards democratic enfranchisement with the Representation of the People Act in 1832. The first half of the twentieth century witnessed further ideological transformations that led to greater, although by no means full, equality for women and the working classes.36 And following the First World War (which the government presented as a fight for democracy), enfranchisement increased by 50 per cent.37 The greatest expansion of suffrage in the nation’s history enabled women over age thirty and working-class men to participate in deciding elections in 1918, and culminated in 1928 when women achieved voting rights on parity with men. Yet while ostensibly the rise of capitalism was connected to increasing democracy in Britain, people’s access to public space, money, and the infrastructures of modernity still depended on their social status. Carriages and auditoriums were spaces in which ideological conflicts persisted between different classes, genders, races, and other marginalised groups. Many of the tensions surrounding identity were exposed on screen in The Ghost Train (1941), which not only depicted an inclusive space shared by people from all strata of society, but also represented divisions between characters who existed within a social hierarchy.38 In 11

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From Steam to Screen the film, on a train bound for Cornwall, working-​class couple Herbert and Edna sit discussing furniture. Further down the corridor bourgeois Miss Bourne protests at having to show her ticket to the lower-​class guard, implying that her status makes her impervious to his demands. In First Class, meanwhile, Richard Winthrop, a well-​spoken sportsman, objects to a lower-class passenger intruding in his wife’s carriage when vaudeville star Tommy Gander bursts into her private compartment. The travellers in The Ghost Train are from all walks of life: they are working, middle and upper class; they are detectives and comedians, men and women. Yet they all share a train journey. Both rich and poor had inhabited actual railway spaces from the passenger train’s inception in 1825, with First, Second and Third class tickets on offer. And, after the cinema’s invention in 1895, people from diverse backgrounds also inhabited auditoriums together. Audiences for The Ghost Train likely occupied movie theatres in which factory owners sat (albeit in more comfortable seats) alongside their employees. Thus all three spaces –​on the train, in the cinema, and in the representative space on screen –​were socially transformative. Yet in The Ghost Train, sportsman Winthrop commands respect from working-​class comedian Gander, while gender hierarchies are reinforced when Jackie defers to her husband’s commands. As such, disparities remained between customers whose seats were arranged in different sections according to ticket price, and between those who wielded, and were subjugated by, power. Furthermore, actual as well as imagined railway and cinema spaces remained divisive sites where the established patriarchal system was at odds with notions of egalitarianism, and segregation was common to both trains and cinemas. For instance, the widespread use of the word ‘class’ to signify social status in Britain was influenced by the way passengers were organised on the railway, while in movie theatres (particularly during the Second World War), authorities separated white and black cinemagoers.39 Thus the crowds that thronged platforms and auditoriums comprised individuals who all experienced the material effects of Britain’s modernity in diverse ways depending on their position within an imperialist and patriarchal culture. By uncovering the stories of women, working-​class men, children and others, I aim to counter typical narratives 12

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Introduction about mass culture in Britain, and offer a comprehensive account of how modernity transformed the lives of historically marginalised people. Examining the interior spaces of carriages and movie theatres reveals the tensions between individualism and mass participation, and the performance of public and privates notions of the self, which underpinned British culture. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall identify separate public and private spheres as ideological constructs that gendered particular environments for the eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century middle classes.40 The private sphere represented the woman’s realm of the home, as a domestic space separate from both business and employment. Meanwhile the public sphere was conceptualised as masculine, and occupied by men who earned money and contributed to state, rather than merely familial, affairs. The idea of ‘spheres’ spatially organised men and women’s experiences as distinct from one another: women inhabited interiors and were contained within the home, while men frequented the outside world and enjoyed the accompanying freedoms of mobility. However, while trains and cinemas reinforced divergences between both people and spaces, the two technologies simultaneously integrated disparate consumers in a collective. As a result, I argue that fluctuating notions of the public and private in rail and movie theatre spaces prompt us to reconceptualise dualistic notions of separate spheres in the period. Instead, I contend there was fluidity between the personal and the communal, and the interior and exterior. There is debate among scholars, such as Judith Walkowitz and Erika Rappaport, as to how useful the concept of separate spheres (even as changeable, rather than fixed, realms) is in helping us understand the past.41 For example, Jane Rendell proposes that the origins of an ideology that ‘divides city from home, public from private, production from reproduction, and men from women’ is fundamentally patriarchal and capitalist.42 As such, the public/​ private dichotomy cannot accurately reflect any lived experiences except those of bourgeois men. Nancy Fraser challenges the notion of binaries further, not only by acknowledging the intersections between the two realms, but also a ‘nexus of multiple publics.’43 She argues that by rejecting the patriarchal conception of a single, bourgeois public, scholars legitimate public spheres that incorporate various cultures, genders and classes. Drawing on Fraser, my analysis of both 13

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From Steam to Screen public and private spheres (which are ideological) and public and private life (which is enacted), offers what Jeff Weintraub calls a ‘complexification’ of the traditional binary.44 Indeed, there were that there are multifarious public spheres that people accessed differently according to their identity and social status. As such, notions of the public and private change throughout the book, for meanings are particular to each chapter and to each historical ‘public’ that the work encounters. Moreover, counter to arguments by Hannah Arendt, and Richard Sennett, among others, I propose that during modernity it was publicity, not privacy, that exerted a greater influence on everyday life.45 In doing so, I contend that the sheer scale of the changes wrought by industrialisation enhanced possibilities for people to encounter publics outside their own. Mass society, mass media, communication and consumption all necessarily enlarged the visible world and so created more opportunities for different publics to intersect. Additionally, I suggest that there were ebbs and flows between the inside and outside, such as through improved lighting, camera flashes and portability that enabled people to photograph and display interiors at the end of the nineteenth century.46 The inside was also exposed to the outside world when the x-​ray rendered the invisible visible. Kern tells us that ‘[t]‌he opening up of the interior anatomical terrain of the human body by x-​ray was part of a general reappraisal of what is properly inside and what is outside the body, the mind, physical objects, and nations’.47 Andrew Thacker, in his study of modern literature, examines the expression of internal thought in contemporary stream-​of-​consciousness novels during a similar historical period. He contends ‘[n]arrative techniques such as interior monologue […] offer[ed] a method for moving between inner thoughts and outer reality’.48 Externalising internal processes fascinated Cubists, Surrealists and psychoanalysts. Newspapers publicised private legal, economic and extra-​marital affairs.49 And while public buildings including rail stations and hotels were influenced by domestic design practices, private homes borrowed aesthetics from industrial spaces.50 Trains and cinemas, too, created spaces that were neither public nor private. In carriage compartments, the passenger inhabited private spaces on public transport; in movie theatres, the spectator individually traversed onscreen landscapes watched by crowds. One might argue (to borrow 14

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Introduction Hannah Arendt’s language) that the two sites were both intimate and social, for in compartments and darkened movie theatres, passengers and spectators alike were granted the illusion of intimacy in the social realm.51 I therefore conceptualise the public and private realms of modernity as congruent, rather than separate. Perhaps inevitably in a book that primarily explores public spaces and cinemagoing, my emphasis tends to fall on the visible sphere, and I argue throughout the work that the train and the cinema provided people with increased access to public space and leisure time.

Space and Time Railways and cinemas not only transformed how people conceived of space and time, but also how they experienced movement. The need for standardised rail timetables led to governments reconfiguring time into zones recognised around the globe, while in the movie theatre the illusion of motion on screen was created at first sixteen, then twenty-​four, frames per second. Writing about the new phenomenon of moving images in 1895, W K L Dickson and Antonia Dickson used a railway analogy, stating that: This speed [of projection] yields one hundred and sixty-​five thousand six hundred pictures an hour, an amount amply sufficient, when revolved before the eye, for an entertainment. In this connection it is interesting to note that were the spasmodic motions added up by themselves, exclusive of arrests, on the same principle that a train record is computed independently on stoppages, the incredible speed of twenty-​six miles an hour would be shown.52

Space and time are also crucial devices for historians analysing change during modernity. They are variously understood as being ‘annihilated’ (Schivelbusch), suffering a crisis of abundance or scarcity (Kern), or officially recorded to aid the production of nationalist and imperialist control mechanisms (Benedict Anderson).53 Like notions of the public and private spheres, spatiality and temporality are configured differently depending on who is experiencing them, and each chapter in this book recognises a particular group’s encounters with space and time. So, for example, while 15

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From Steam to Screen Chapters One and Four explore how proximity to urban areas affected notions of modernity for the rural working classes and child evacuees respectively, Chapter Three examines women’s access to industrial environments. Yet although individual chapters respond to intersectional understandings of space and time, the book as a whole takes a broader approach. Between 1895 and 1948, I propose that the railway and the cinema converged in three spatiotemporal contexts, which underpin both my historical and theoretical analysis of Britain’s modernity. First, rail stations and branch lines were used as film sets. The railway provided locations not only for fiction films (in The Ghost Train and 1929’s The Flying Scotsman, among others) but also for newsreels and documentaries.54 For example, both royal carriages and wartime ambulance trains were filmed by newsreel companies and so became ubiquitous on screens and in popular culture. Second, movie theatre architecture entered railway spaces when, in 1924, the London and North Eastern Railway Company (LNER) built an auditorium on a train.55 And, third, the technologies visually intersected on screen. In the fifty-​three year period, at least twenty-​five fiction films were produced in Britain that featured train journeys. A product of the second-​ wave industrial revolution, the filmic medium often referred to the first-​ wave locomotive as a signifier for the modern, machine age. Additionally, hundreds of short films made for news programmes documented advances in rail technology, boasting of speed (Flying Scotsman to Beat Timetable, 1932) or innovation (First Streamlined Diesel Train, 1932).56 But the train was also a metaphor for fears about class, gender, and even filmgoing. From early cinema’s A Kiss in the Tunnel (1899), via silent drama The Wrecker (1929), to sound feature The Lady Vanishes (1939), films about crimes set on the railway made visual people’s anxieties about mechanisation and the authority of images in a world awash with new technology.57 In an era of steady industrial decline, the plethora of railway fiction, documentary and newsreel films are significant because the movies now reveal how potent the train was as a symbol of modernity within British culture.58 My interrogating the representation of the railway and movie theatres in the space beyond the screen is indebted in general to the ‘spatial turn’ in Film Studies, and to the work of Giuliana Bruno in particular. Bruno maps what she identifies as ‘inhabited’ cinematic spaces in her work on 16

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Introduction the intersections between architecture, cinema and affect.59 Taking her cues from geography and the visual arts, she contends that motion pictures are both architectural and emotive, and so are embodied experiences that enable visitors to travel as tourists through projected onscreen spaces. Evoking Schivelbusch, Bruno determines that moving images are ‘sites’ as well as inhabited ‘sights’.60 Similarly, Edward Dimendberg contributes to the spatial study of cinema in his work on film noir in the United States.61 He theorises that the film noir cycle represents historic urban spaces through which viewers can re-​live past experiences and practice cultural remembrance. Like Bruno, Dimendberg also attests that spectators ‘inhabit’ the filmic spaces that appear in the auditorium. But whereas Bruno explores the spaces beyond the screen as extensions of actual, lived spaces, Dimendberg adopts a different method. He examines the relationship between the three-​dimensional built environment and its two-​dimensional representation on screen, maintaining a clear distinction between the two throughout his work. So whereas Bruno has the viewer assimilated by the moving picture (the viewer is Alice through –​even beyond –​the looking glass), Dimendberg, drawing on de Certeau, suggests that audiences make less interpolative journeys through filmic space, and instead plot actual and imagined space on an onscreen map. My approach in this book occupies an overlapping site somewhere between Bruno’s argument for architectural spaces beyond the screen, and Dimendberg’s exploration of a cinematic memory that evokes historic environments. I envisage the onscreen architecture as figuratively geographical, in that film spectatorship invites viewers to traverse cinematic space as vicarious tourists, and I also conceive of moving images as archival, in that they enable spectators to inhabit the past. As one early cinema attendee excitedly reported when they watched footage shot on the continent and projected in Britain, they ‘saw France as clearly as if [they] had gone there with a Cook’s ticket.’62 Thus I argue that motion pictures not only have a spatiality of their own, but also open up historic sites and sights to audiences. Asserting that moving images are archives, I offer a theoretical framework for using cinema as a primary source in historical study. Of course,  the  idea that motion pictures record the past is not a new one, as reviewer O Winter asserted in 1896 that films ‘will be poured out to 17

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From Steam to Screen the students of the future […] and though their very impartiality may mislead, at least they will provide the facts for a liberal judgment.’63 While I do not propose that archived motion pictures offer unbiased records, throughout the book I refer to films produced on celluloid nitrate or acetate, which captured images in a chemical process reliant on light, and in doing so, stored both time and space. As Laura Mulvey describes, there was a ‘material connection’ between the recorded object and its trace on celluloid.64 As such, when the film is projected, the past is released in the present, restored, and then re-​stored until the next screening. Motion pictures, therefore, are not only archived, but also archives of the moment of filming. Newsreels, documentaries, information and fiction films offer more than merely visual representations of the spaces they depict on screen because they invite us into the ‘dead’ spaces of yesterday that we can no longer visit. In her work on cinematic time, Mary Ann Doane, like Schivelbusch, contends that technologies in the nineteenth century wrought dramatic change on how people experienced space and time.65 Electric light bulbs reconfigured the working day; photography stopped time dead in its tracks; and film speeded it back up again. Consequently, Doane contends that temporal and spatial fragmentation has led to social contingency and a dependence on archives to restore continuation (what Jacques Derrida calls ‘archival trauma’).66 Moreover, she argues that cinephilia is an instinctive archival response to the decay of celluloid in the onslaught of digital technologies. Her work ultimately considers how films archive time and why we archive film, acknowledging that cinema plays a vital role in the processes of collection and preservation. My research, concerned with moving images as archives, expands on Doane’s theory by exploring in practice how cinema archives time, spaces and things. Films, of course, are full of things. The screen is a museum cataloguing objects from modernity to the present day: trains, tables, typewriters and aeroplanes are all scrutinised on camera. Cinema, then, shows us the stuff of everyday life. Bill Brown analyses such materiality in his work on ‘thing theory’, in which he contends that people learn to understand their cultures and histories through objects.67 Taking a deconstructionist approach, Friedrich Kittler also prioritises the role of objects and technologies in 18

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Introduction helping historians examine the past.68 He argues that all objects disrupt time, and reduce human, sensory experiences to a series of patterns, codes or chemical processes. I similarly historicise the impact that objects (for example, train carriages) had on the people that encountered them, and analyse how the stuff of modernity  –​advertisements, films, radios and other mechanical things –​transformed how people understood the industrial world. Because I conceive moving images as both spatial and archival, the book pays attention to both actual and onscreen objects. Take, for example, the 1936 film Night Mail, a documentary that romanticises the British Travelling Post Office by coupling stylised cinematography with W H Auden’s poetry.69 The overall effect is to reveal the hidden labour that connects letter writers across the country by way of the rail network, and to promote an imperial ideology that applauds Britain’s mechanical efficiency. Yet beyond giving today’s viewers a lesson in the nationalistic rhetoric of the past, the film also captures details of the everyday lives of railway workers in the 1930s. On screen, various sequences show men sorting letters into pigeonholes, and Post Office apparatus catching parcels from speeding locomotives. The documentary exposes station architectures and the design of railway clocks, as well as the colloquial expressions used by Post Office and canteen employees. Later, Night Mail documents the skyline of Glasgow for posterity. Film, then, has the potential to augment historical study through both restoration and preservation: the past is returned on screen, and spaces, people and objects are indexically preserved on celluloid, appearing to viewers now in moving museums.

Approaching the Past To articulate how this book approaches its historical subject matter and analyses archival evidence, I  briefly turn to Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, which examines how people appropriate the languages, spaces and commodities of mass culture in their daily lives.70 His investigation of everyday life not only resonates with my own, but also provides an analogy pertinent to my overall approach. In the book, de Certeau problematises the ‘relations between the act of writing and the written text’ 19

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From Steam to Screen (evidence and interpretation) through a comparison between people traversing New York’s streets and a person viewing the city from the top of the World Trade Centre.71 He argues that those on the ground ‘actualise’ the possibilities of movement and vision as they negotiate the city’s physical interface.72 However, the person atop the skyscraper is ‘at a distance’ from the streets and so, ‘seeing the whole,’ transforms the world into a text.73 The example summarises the duality of my method. On the one hand, I use qualitative and quantitative data from archival sources to establish a material history of the railway and cinema in Britain that investigates how people moved and looked inside carriages and auditoriums. On the other hand, I draw on theory to contextualise people’s everyday experiences and to evaluate their conceptions of modernity. As such, the book operates both on the ground and from a bird’s eye view to connect the railways and cinema with Britain’s experiences of industrialisation. In doing so, the research draws on four main archival sources. These are: moving images and other visual media; the daily press; personal testimonies; and government and business records. All the sources provide material evidence of the past by documenting how people looked at, moved through, and interpreted space. Moreover, recognising how these media interpret, as well as reveal, history is fundamental to my analysis. As Carolyn Steedman contends, historians must address the gap between archival sources and how we conceptualise the past.74 For example, in her research on women in Second World War cinemas, Janet Thumim reveals the gap between representations of women on screen, and the everyday lives of people sitting in cinemas.75 Or we might think about newspapers, which record history according to the political bias of each publication, and so create variances between titles as well as between articles and actual events. Frederic Jameson explains the separation between an event and its historicisation in his theory of the ‘political unconscious’, in which he asserts history is ‘inaccessible’ except through textual forms, which are both fantasies of, and disconnected from, what is real.76 What is more, our readings of the past are always influenced by our positions in the present.77 Historiography, therefore, is always the rewriting of what went before, as every historian adds a new interpretive layer to narratives of the past. 20

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Introduction Philip Rosen identifies the ‘[i]‌deal [c]hronicle’ (‘the perfect historical source document’) as offering both an eyewitness account and an indexical trace of historical events.78 However, the ‘ideal chronicle’ offers a false promise. Sociologist Penny Summerfield theorises that as personal testimonies rely on language (which is metaphor), autobiographical accounts are always ‘deploying cultural constructions,’ formed subject to, rather than objectively of, ideological discourses.79 But this does not mean archival media are unreliable, for by analysing the residual layers of meaning that accrue with the recording of historical events, historians can encompass such biases within their studies.80 As such, I  read all sources (including film, newspapers and personal testimonies, which are limited to already-​ archived accounts) as reconstructions of the past. Furthermore, to ensure that the book reflects the cultural concerns of people experiencing modernity in Britain, rather than my own, I have selected case studies that represent widely discussed issues and events in the archival materials. Consequently, the book privileges encounters with the railways and cinema, such as early train films in Chapter One, or the movie theatre carriage in Chapter Five, that emerge from extensive discussion or representation in the daily press and visual media. Also worth noting is that, while the book ostensibly focuses on the period between 1895 and 1948, and each chapter examines a different, specific period (for example, Chapter One looks at 1895 to 1910, and Chapter Two concentrates on 1914 to 1918), the nature of the subject matter is such that I often draw attention to earlier, or interrelated historical moments. As a result, Chapter One offers an introduction to nineteenth-​century ghost stories, and in Chapter Three, an analysis of gender and interwar railway films is prefaced by an exploration of accidents and disasters affecting women in the early twentieth century. Although my approach at times defies the logic of chronology, I argue that historical narratives are not linear and straightforward, but rather circuitous and complex. Moreover, the book resists the temptation to delineate all technologies and trends as ‘new’, and instead aims to demonstrate developments and continuities between the railways and cinema in British culture. Nevertheless, beginning at the book’s earliest historical point, Chapter One, ‘Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class at the Cinematograph Show,’ 21

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From Steam to Screen re-​examines the enduring myth of the ‘panicking audience’ in early cinema. Expanding on existing scholarship about the so-​called ‘train effect’, which described the sensation of onscreen locomotives rushing towards the screen and terrifying spectators, the chapter emphasises the class disparities between the bourgeois writers reporting on the phenomenon, and the working-​class subjects allegedly panicking. Furthermore, the chapter interrogates the connections in British culture between the experience of modernity and proximity to an urban environment by drawing analogies between the representations of supposedly ignorant, working-​ class viewers, ‘country bumpkins,’ and colonial subjects in the daily press. Additionally, the chapter analyses both visual distinctions and continuities between industrial and pastoral environments in ‘train effect’ and phantom ride films, such as When the Devil Drives (1907).81 In doing so, I compare the histories of middle-​class and metropolitan, and working-​class and rural, cinemagoing between 1895 and 1910 to challenge notions about film viewers panicking at shows. I  trace discourses about class, cinemagoing and travel not only through records in town and city-​based newspapers, as well as the trade press for showmen and Bioscope operators at countryside fairgrounds, but also through reports about ghost literature and spirit sightings in the Victorian period. By referring to bourgeois writing about ghost culture, and expanding scholarship on cinema’s uncanny origins, the chapter reveals how the middle-class tendency to conceive of the working classes as visually illiterate was well established by the time cinema emerged in 1895. Thus, by situating narratives about the panicking audience in a broader history of industrialisation and mass consumption, the chapter proposes that the ‘panicking audience’ was a construct designed to offset middle-​class anxieties about transformations to social status wrought by modernity. In Chapter One, I frame reports about early cinema and rail travel as elements of a class war in which people attempted to entrench their social status through maligning others’ abilities to understand modern technologies. In keeping with themes about propaganda and the role of the railway and cinema in facilitating the formation of cultural identity, Chapter Two, ‘Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict in the First World War’, examines fears about mechanisation in public and private media from 1914 to 1919. 22

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Introduction Throughout the war, newsreels, as well as the daily and trade presses, frequently represented ambulance trains in moving images and photographs. Films including Behind the Lines with Our French Ally (1917), The Care of Our Wounded (1918) and The Wonderful Organisation of the RAMC (1916) encouraged viewers on the home front to focus on the care provided for wounded soldiers.82 The ambulance train newsreels offered positive narratives about salvation and egalitarian treatment on the western front and effectively ‘whitewashed’ stories about the front line. Throughout the chapter, I demonstrate how the whitewashing of space, people and information both emerged from, and fed into, anxieties about modernity and imperialism. Alongside newsreels, I draw on government records, the daily press and personal testimonies written by the ambulance train staffs to compare the visual representation of the caregiving spaces (which publicly projected Britain’s technological prowess) with privately recorded evidence from inside the trains. Public news media and personal testimonies often shared a common vocabulary that sought to distance the human experience from the railway and the camera’s interventions in warfare. Nevertheless, while the films depict female nurses, working-​class privates and upper-​class officers all inhabiting carriages together, personal testimonies reveal that the trains were divisive spaces that separated conscripted troops from officers, and men from women. Moreover, by drawing attention to diaries and first-​hand accounts of life on the trains, the chapter offers a new history of the train’s significance in wartime caregiving. Continuing my investigation into the ways that rail and cinema technologies contributed to separating passengers and spectators in public and private realms, Chapter Three, ‘Train Crashes, Cinema Fires and the Precarious Modern Woman’, explores how women both inhabited, and were represented in, carriages and movie theatres. Focusing on the interwar period, which was one of relative safety on the railway and in cinemas, the chapter reveals British media’s fascination with tragic stories about women as victims of technological malfunction that draw on narratives popular in the early ​twentieth century. As such, I examine the disasters common to narratives about modernity –​rail crashes and cinema fires –​ to develop the narrative begun in Chapter Two about cultural anxieties relating to machines. The chapter argues that, while the mass production 23

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From Steam to Screen and consumption typical of modernity invited greater numbers of women into public space, patriarchal fears about the effects on the family sought to restrict female mobility. Hence, women who entered the public realm faced an imagined, yet pervasive, danger. In train wrecks or celluloid-​ sparked factory fires, film and the daily press portrayed women as vulnerable to the mistakes of male drivers, passengers, and projectionists. Onscreen, female passengers and spectators, who frequently appeared in the role of amateur detectives in crime dramas played out on trains (for example, The Wrecker, 1929) or in cinemas (Sabotage, 1936), faced ridicule, and even death, as punishment for their public actions.83 Using both newsreels and feature films, the chapter proposes that, while the onscreen representation of danger was melodramatic, depictions of women’s broken bodies illustrate how differently women experienced modernity from their male counterparts. Alongside women, children were also perceived as victims in British culture who, as representatives of the nation’s future, needed adult protection from harm. During the Second World War, child evacuees became a potent symbol both of the upheaval the nation faced in the conflict and its ability to maintain imperial power. Consequently, Chapter Four, ‘Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity in the Second World War’, uncovers how proximity to an urban environment shaped children’s experiences of modernity, and so expands the narrative begun in Chapter One about people’s experiences of rail and film outside urban environments. During the conflict, trains removed children not only from family and friends, but also from mechanised and militarised towns and cities. Cultural anxieties about the dangers posed by industrialisation (also examined in Chapters Two and Three) fuelled the mass migration of British youths to rural areas that were unlikely targets for German bombs. As a result, children raised amid the densely populated and electrically lit streets of Britain’s manufacturing hubs were billeted in pastoral locations that had fewer cinemas. Through personal testimonies, the daily press, and films screened for child audiences, such as Alice in Wonderland (1933), the chapter explores temporal and spatial dissonance between urban and rural life, and investigates the importance of portable projectors and mobile cinemas in helping child evacuees maintain connections to urban space.84 24

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Introduction Finally, the book shifts away from examining the cultural divisions manifested in railway and cinema spaces and turns instead to the technologies’ roles in connecting people not only within Britain, but also to the empire. Taking in a longer history of the train and moving image than the previous four chapters, Chapter Five, ‘The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire’, rediscovers the architectural intersections of rail and motion-​ picture technologies between 1895 and 1948. Drawing on Chapter One’s history of Bioscopes, and the history of portable projectors discussed in Chapter Four, I expand on narratives about mobile spectatorship and the significance of train and film technologies in promoting Britain’s imperial interests. Throughout the chapter, I argue that the coming of the railway movie theatre both increased railway profits amid competition for fares, and contributed to the nation’s self-​projected modernity. The Chapter also pays particular attention to the cinema train’s role in advertising Britain’s technological innovation to international audiences. To examine the movie coach in an imperial context, I analyse the newsreel pictures shown inside the train. For example, New Berth for Bananas (1938) and Their Majesties Tour in Lanarkshire (1938) both represented Britain’s links to empire, industry and foreign trade.85 In addition to analysing the movie coach’s imperial resonances in British popular culture, I also identify the space as one that commoditised moving and looking in complex ways. Open to any passenger who could afford the cinema’s entry fee, the rail-​ bound movie theatre housed spectators in an egalitarian auditorium that made no distinction between class, gender, age or (as far as records show) ethnicity. Moreover, the cinema train was an innovative entertainment site in which all consumers were positioned as passengers and spectators on both actual and vicarious journeys. Using an extant British Pathé film, descriptions in the daily press, and photographs from within the coaches, I theorise the experience of entering the coach and watching a film while moving between stations. Inside the cinema carriage, passengers and spectators confronted both a pioneering technology that made pictorial news mobile, and an imperial, establishment ideology. Consequently, I propose that the movie coach represents broader patterns in British culture whereby tradition and colonial decline intersect with a national identity predicated on speed, technological innovation and modernity. 25

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From Steam to Screen By exploring case studies focusing on class, state propaganda, gender, children, and empire, the book traces how railways and cinemas transformed notions and experiences of space and time for different groups of people. Throughout the work, I propose that the intersections between train and filmic technologies were connected to the social upheavals and cultural transformations that the nation encountered between the coming of cinema and the state’s reconfiguring of the railways. Consequently, the carriages, auditoriums and onscreen spaces of the past reveal the enormous changes wrought by modernity on everyday life in Britain. The railways and cinema are not only connected, but also connect us now to the times and spaces from which the technologies emerged. The book thus offers a cultural history of the train and film’s impacts on daily life that is crucial to understanding changes that continue to resonate in British culture today.

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1 Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class at the Cinematograph Show

One of the enduring myths of early cinema is that of the ‘panicking audience’, who, on seeing films featuring locomotives moving towards the screen, would cry out, jump from their seats, or rush for the exits, fearing that the vehicle would enter the auditorium.1 Work by Stephen Bottomore and Tom Gunning, among others, has explored the veracity of such claims, and it is not the aim of this chapter to debate whether the so-​called ‘train effect’ existed in actuality.2 However, while the chapter expands on existing research on early railway films, it also challenges scholarship that tends to be complicit in entrenching the bourgeois ideology of film spectatorship that is dominant within the archive. For when reading news reports about the train effect, our view of history is distorted through a middle-​class lens that represented the panicking audience as working class, or country bumpkins, who were unable to comprehend the advancements of urban modernity such as moving images and onscreen trains. For example, writing about Méliès’s shows in Paris, Gunning suggests that ‘[t]‌he audience […] addressed was not primarily gullible country bumpkins, but sophisticated urban pleasure seekers, well aware that they were seeing the most modern techniques in stage craft.’3 By differentiating between metropolitan and educated viewers and

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From Steam to Screen ‘gullible country bumpkins’, Gunning reproduces middle-​class notions about early film spectatorship. Consequently, I propose that unpicking intertwined assumptions about class implicit in narratives about both the ‘train effect’ and phantom rides reveals how social status and proximity to urban environments impacted early audiences’ encounters with film. The chapter explores cinema and spectatorship in conjunction with other cultural phenomena of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including gothic literature, scientific demonstrations, and fairgrounds, to highlight the myriad ways in which people from different classes engaged with modern technology. I challenge assumptions about class and cinemagoing by focusing on the intermediality of the train film, and how various audiences were perceived to experience the ‘train effect’ in popular culture by critics, writers and filmmakers.4 Between 1896, when the Lumières and R W Paul first projected moving images in Britain, and 1909, when both the Cinematograph Act and transition from short one-​reel films to longer, narrative features established new exhibition trends, the railway shaped cinema’s aesthetics.5 From trains rushing towards bustling station platforms in L’Arrivée d’un Train à la Ciotat (1895) and Royal Train (1896), to the eerie tracking shots of phantom rides such as Railway Ride Over the Tay Bridge (1897), rail travel was a ubiquitous motif in early cinema.6 However, the train, which already featured heavily in British literature and visual culture, was not the only recurrent image on screen. For the ‘train effect’ films and phantom rides emerged not only from rail and film technologies’ intersections with one another, but also from an established cultural fascination for both the supernatural and scientific innovation, which underpinned a variety of entertainments including urban theatre and rural travelling shows. As a result, I contend that, while different demographics of viewers experienced cinema in a variety of ways, stories about uneducated ‘panicking audiences’ during screenings of train films legitimised filmgoing as a bourgeois pursuit and ignored working-​class and rural entertainments. Yet in research on early cinemagoing, discourses particular to the middle ​classes that permeate extant primary sources (such as criticism in newspapers or journals) tend to stand as fact. For example, in Bottomore’s 28

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class article on ‘the train effect’, he claims the representation of the panicking country bumpkin emphasised the sophistication of urban audiences.7 However, he simultaneously upholds both class and colonial stereotypes by failing to critique stories about rural working-​class viewers in Scotland, or distant spectators in India or South America, being struck with wonder on first encountering film.8 That is not to suggest that first-​time viewers in any location might not have reacted with amazement at the seemingly animated pictures; rather, I  aim to challenge notions of class privilege embedded in narratives about early cinema spectatorship. In reconsidering how people conceived of train films, I  take my cues from Vanessa Toulmin, whose work on fairgrounds and touring Bioscopes foregrounds rural and working-​class viewers, and Nicholas Mirzoeff, who emphasises the hierarchical nature of spectatorship as determined by white, bourgeois institutions.9 Central to my argument is that, alongside entrenching vertical class hierarchies (which organised people from the monarchy down to the unemployed), the industrial revolution produced a horizontal class structure based on people’s perceived proximity to modernity. For as urban areas grew to accommodate growing populations of workers in new factories, and as railways spread between towns and villages and eradicated rural isolation, the idea of the metropolis as a site of modernity was normalised in British culture. Literature and the daily press represented the city as superior to the countryside for its innovative and modern culture, and so the working classes in rural areas were doubly subject to the superiority of wealthier and urbanised middle-​class writers.10 Indeed, even scholars writing about modernity, such as Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Deirdre Boden and Roger Friedland, and Stephen Kern, tend to focus on urban experiences.11 However, as David Harvey argues, urbanisation and ‘geographical transformation’ are central to how capitalism operates and expands.12 Consequently, people’s encounters with modernity in rural locations were just as crucial to the growth of mass consumption as they were to their city-​ dwelling counterparts. The chapter first examines Victorian ghost stories to set up my argument about intermediality. I read popular gothic literature (including stories featuring the railway) alongside serialised ghost narratives in the daily 29

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From Steam to Screen press and actual accounts of hauntings to demonstrate not only the ubiquity of the genre, but also its fascination for scientific and optical technologies. Drawing on literary theory that situates the gothic as part of, rather than in opposition to, modernity, I  propose that the binarism of the supernatural and the rational, which both legitimised and undermined belief in phantoms, demonstrates the simultaneity foundational to experiences of modern life in Britain. Moreover, my investigating middle-​class reports of rural and working-​class ghost sightings contextualises later stories about the panicking audience, which I contend emerge from the same class prejudices. Then, the chapter considers the aesthetic and experiential connections between Victorian ghost stories and both ‘train effect’ films and phantom rides, arguing that, on screen or off, people were familiar with, and enjoying, what I call the ‘aesthetic of the inexplicable’. Finally, after analysing the bourgeois narratives perpetuated in reviews of train films and their audiences, the chapter offers an alternative history of ghost media and cinema at fairgrounds. From the showmen distributing film on the rail network and exhibiting moving images in tents and Bioscopes, to the isolated farmers and village dwellers who attended the shows, people in the countryside consumed stories about the supernatural and science. As such, I propose that Britain’s modernity was not confined to urban environments, and that people encountered technological innovation at a variety of sites and with numerous frames of reference. Instead, I suggest that narratives about panicking audiences enabled bourgeois writers to emphasise class hierarchies and so resist the perceived democratisation brought about by mass consumption.

Ghosts in Victorian Culture In 1887, during a fictional middle-​class gathering at which the guests are preparing to tell ghost stories, Mrs Snowdon proclaims ‘ Aren’t you tired of them? One hears nothing else nowadays.’13 Such was the ubiquity of the supernatural in popular culture that even the characters within ghost stories acknowledged their fatigue with the genre. Phantoms, hauntings and spectres appeared in a variety of media, from serious literary fiction, 30

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class newspaper serials, and theatre, to penny dreadfuls, ghost shows and fairground rides.14 Famous examples included Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and the successful stage production The Phantoms, which was, according to one critic, ‘weird and thrilling’ and contained ‘elements of mystery’.15 And, while the styles and themes of ghost stories transformed over time according to the cultural concerns of the day, the paranormal consistently figured as a means for people to test and comprehend how mechanisation altered the world around them. In his work on Victorian hauntings, Julian Wolfreys argues that spirit visitations informed how people conceived of modernity because the spectral connoted a ‘gap’ or ‘disruption’ in everyday life.16 While Wolfreys does not offer a specific definition of modernity, his reference to spatial and temporal dissonance is reminiscent of Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s suggestion that the railways, a founding technology of the industrial revolution, contributed to the ‘annihilation [of] space and time’.17 Scientific discoveries throughout the nineteenth century blurred traditional boundaries between the public and private, and the visible and invisible, and architects, artists and writers, among others, challenged perceptions of space and time. Stephen Kern asserts that technological innovation led to a ‘general reappraisal of what is properly inside and what is outside the body, the mind, physical objects, and nations’.18 For example, the notion of telepathy, the transmission of thoughts between different people via waves, rather than verbal or bodily communication, emerged in 1882 based on telegraph infrastructure, which relied on waves to send information between two points.19 Industrial arenas infiltrated the domestic, with toy trains popularised by the mid-​1890s and a home’s proximity to a rail station becoming a selling point on the rental market, while the natural world crept into constructed environments through William Morris’s arts-​and-​crafts plant designs and later the floral patterns of art nouveau.20 In February 1896, the press excitedly reported a new instrument that revealed heretofore-​unseen spaces to viewers. In an x-​ray, or ‘Roentgen’s rays’, experiment at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, the ‘new’ photography showed doctors the position of a fracture within a man’s finger.21 Subsequently, newspaper readers were exposed to advertisements for ‘[p]‌hotographs of the invisible!’, with the oxymoron implicit in the copy demonstrating the inexplicable nature of the x-​ray image.22 31

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From Steam to Screen While technology opened up new possibilities to travel through and look upon the world from different perspectives, it was not always easy to comprehend the science behind the almost magical effects of the telegraph or the camera. In some cases  –​for instance, the wave theory of light  –​ science actually encouraged arguments about the existence of the supernatural, because seeing, which was only made possible by invisible waves and particles, was no longer equated with believing.23 Spectacular scientific demonstrations that defied people’s commonly held beliefs about physics or chemistry were popular in lecture halls across Britain.24 In literature, Arthur Conan Doyle, who was well known for his spiritualist beliefs, famously juxtaposed the scientific and otherworldly in the Sherlock Holmes stories, in which Holmes typically reveals illusions that fool others into believing that they see ghosts.25 And, owing to the proliferation of inexplicably moving and mechanically reproduced pictures in zoetropes, praxinoscopes and Kinetoscopes, the ontological status of images shifted and became doubtful. For the Victorian spectator, there was no way of ascertaining what was real or unreal when scientists, showmen and others deployed technology to trick the eyes and mind in so wide a variety of settings. Often, modernity and superstition in literature appeared to refute one another. In ‘A Ghost Hunt’, the would-​be spirit-seers propose that urban, industrial environments are not conducive to ghosts. The narrator exclaims, ‘Ye Gods! in these days of Roentgen rays had ghosts condescended to “walk” in the neighbourhood of an incandescent lamp?’26 Nevertheless, the scientific and otherworldly did intersect, with the ‘real’ applying both to science and to phantoms. As Brown, a character in The Mad Scientist, conjectures, ‘it seems to me that the difference between what we call the natural and the supernatural is merely the difference between frequency and rarity of occurrence.’27 The story’s protagonist is a ‘man of science’ who initially does not believe his eyes when a skeleton in his laboratory appears to move one evening, as he attributes the phenomenon to a hallucination. His ambivalence about the reanimated corpse was typical of nineteenth-​ century medical professionals that explained actual reports of ghosts by way of visual or mental diseases.28 However, the scientist’s scepticism of the supernatural is proved wrong when the skeleton strangles and murders 32

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class him. When his friends discover his body (and blame the skeleton for the murder without hesitation) one notes that ‘in his eyes there was a terror such as is not often seen in human eyes.’29 His eyes, which he thought deceived him, actually provide evidence about his death, and so are bound up in discourse about the relationship between sight, image and reality, where none of the links are certain. Alongside visual technologies and anxieties about the accuracy of human perception, ghost stories frequently featured the railway. The train served as a connection between urban modernity and a historicised countryside that was home to phantoms and undead spirits. In Mary Louisa Molesworth’s serial ‘At the Dip of the Road’, the protagonist’s distance from a rail station connotes proximity to a bygone age and signifies an increased threat of haunting.30 Moreover, writers perceived train travel as uncanny because locomotives not only featured inexplicable mechanics within the engine, but also propelled otherwise stationary passengers between destinations. Alongside furniture, people, and objects in ghost stories, the train moved in mysterious ways and with seeming autonomy. For example, in a story in the Nottinghamshire Guardian, an apparition departed ‘up the walls, over the roofs, and vanished into the clouds, for all the world like a shadow.’31 The train, which disappeared through tunnels and cuttings only to reappear further along the line as if by magic, thus shared features with the supernatural. In addition, the railway’s centrality to notions of British national identity and practical role in connecting workers and holidaymakers to their homes configured the train in narratives about domesticity. The rail network was simultaneously familiar, in that people used it as part of their daily routines, and mysterious, in that passengers did not necessarily understand how the technology transported them. In a serialised story called ‘The Red Star’, railway aesthetics such as signals, alongside other visual signs of modernity, have an uncanny effect on the narrator and cause him to mistake the iconography of mechanised, everyday life for the supernatural.32 Sigmund Freud determines that the familiar and the ‘homely’ become uncanny when combined with a novel or unfamiliar element.33 Consequently the railway, which amalgamated the known and unknown in the train journey, was conducive to the gothic imaginary, which was 33

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From Steam to Screen dependent on people’s sense that the supernatural could manifest anywhere, including seemingly safe spaces such as the home.34 Another visceral motif in ghost stories that emphasised both the railway’s liminal existence in between inhabited places, and the other-​worldly environments writers commonly described in tales about the supernatu­ ral, was the tunnel. The tunnel represented a dark and unknowable site on the periphery of human existence. One journalist, on entering the Dore and Padley railway tunnel, reported an eerie experience that drew heavily on language associated with ghost stories. He wrote that he moved ‘in the deepest gloom; then, through a thick, almost choking vapour that makes the lamplight feeble, you can just discern the shadowy forms of men who look like giant phantoms fighting as they strike, not at each other, but at the rock.’35 As Schivelbusch asserts, once inside the space, passengers ‘lost contact with the landscape’.36 In his argument, Schivelbusch alludes to the structure’s uncanniness, for the familiar becomes strange when the train artificially separates the traveller from the natural world. Additionally, the train entering the tunnel created tensions between movement and sight, as when in darkness passengers could not determine whether they were mobile because there was no passing scenery to anchor the sensation of movement. The tunnel, in keeping with gothic narratives about moder­ nity, therefore accentuated people’s ambivalence about seeing-​as-​believing and the mechanical or magical rationale underpinning their everyday experiences. As well as tapping into people’s anxieties about the similarities and differences between science and the supernatural, the tunnel also represented a portal between the material and ethereal realms. For example, in Dickens’s The Signalman, the ‘black tunnel’ is lit by a single ‘gloomy red light’ that not only signals danger to oncoming locomotives, but also to any humans that venture near its entrance. The ‘massive’ tunnel exudes a ‘barbarous, depressing and forbidding air.’37 The structure’s size and blackness, which suggests an absence of life or any vestige of the familiar, physical environment, makes the narrator feel that he has ‘left the natural world’.38 It is no wonder that the men in the story believe they have seen ghosts when near the tunnel’s mouth. Of course, it is doubtful whether the narrator or the eponymous signalman actually see phantoms. The signalman takes first 34

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class the narrator, then the train driver, for spirits, and the narrator also confuses the train driver for a ghost. Hence the signalman’s story about being haunted is called into question because the reader cannot be certain that his original vision, too, was not based on mistaken identity. Dickens’s tale takes place in a world that is neither here nor there, and so the ghost’s veracity is never resolved; The Signalman’s horror thus relies on something uncertain, just like the tunnel and the railway line that passes through the cavernous architecture. Locomotives also materially enabled people to participate in Victorian ghost tourism. Across Britain, the railway gave passengers access to historic and potentially haunted sites where people could participate in ghost-​ spotting, with the supernatural central to an expanding tourism and leisure economy. Near the rural Leasowe station in Hampshire, sightseers travelled to visit an allegedly haunted castle before authorities demolished the structure. The Portsmouth Evening News reported ‘[t]‌he resources of the Wirral Railway must have been especially taxed, to judge by the crowds the trains deposited every hour […] bent on campaigns of curiosity’.39 And in a Scottish newspaper report on historical country houses recorded in the Guide to the Great North of Scotland Railway, the article referred to legends about ghosts to persuade readers to visit the various locations.40 Indeed, during the period the word ‘haunt’ was commonly used not only to describe spirit visitations, but also to denote a favourite place that people visited for pleasure.41 Tourism and the supernatural, therefore, intersected to provide a spectacular attraction that mapped ghostly happenings onto the railway network. However, the ways that people engaged in ghost-​oriented leisure pursuits depended on their social status. According to writers of the daily press and literature (who were likely to be middle class and educated), class, and by implication income, determined how spectators encountered the supernatural just as class divided passengers in railway carriages. For example, in towns and cities, the middle classes accessed a ghost culture that foregrounded their preoccupations about respectability and modernity. Pepper’s Ghost, a theatrical show initially demonstrated by John Henry Pepper in London, relied on the appearance of a ‘ghost’ that appeared simultaneously both inside and outside a window.42 The performance 35

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From Steam to Screen foregrounded science and logic in creating a spectacular and apparently magical effect and acknowledged the ability of the audience to see through the illusion. Pepper wrote: [The apparition was not] an ordinary old-​fashioned ghost, appearing in the midnight hour to people with a weak digestion, haunting graveyards and old country mansions, and inspiring romance-​writers into the mischief of three-​volume novels; but of a well-​behaved, steady, regular, and respectable ghost, going through a prescribed round of duties, punctual to the minute –​ a Patent Ghost, in fact.43

His description reveals that Pepper’s Ghost was a bourgeois spirit that defied both the romanticised ghost story (at a time when women writers dominated the genre), and any tendency to actually believe in phantoms. In doing so, he legitimised the apparition through asserting traditional notions of masculinity –​both through rejecting feminine ‘romance’ and asserting the ghost’s business-​like characteristics  –​and emphasising its modern and logical nature. The middle-​class ‘Patent Ghost’ was the antithesis of the traditional haunting that was, by implication, experienced by the working-​class or countryside rube. Moreover, in novels or collections of short stories available to literate people with income to spare on reading materials, middle-​class characters perceived ghost stories as entertainment. As such, the Victorian middle ​classes scientifically rationalised the supernatural, and the enjoyment of ghost stories was distinct from what many saw as the irrational faith of the working classes in actual spectres. According to reports in the daily press, people who were distant from urban modernity or of a lower class believed in ‘real’ ghosts that existed outside the figurative constructs of art and science. For example, in Sheffield, working-​class women and children were allegedly scared to go out after dark when rumours circulated about a ghost wandering the streets.44 However, most stories about actual hauntings emerged from rural locations, and the countryside inhabitants that claimed to see spirits faced derision from journalists. In one Yorkshire village, a married couple raised the alarm when their furniture began to move autonomously. The Yorkshire Evening Post claimed that ‘[s]‌ome people, determining to get to 36

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class the truth of the business, began to watch, and they declare that the apparition appeared, having a face resembling a cartwheel and a frightful tail.’45 Nonsensical details such as ‘a face resembling a cartwheel’ undermined the story’s credence and gave the article a humorous tone that suggested educated readers should not take the report seriously. Whereas the thrill of bourgeois gothic literature was predicated on uncertainty about whether phantoms existed, the daily press indicated that working-​class and rural ghost cultures were based on misplaced confidence in the spectre’s material presence. The supposed differences between people’s encounters with ghosts caused by class and location, and the variations in form and address that underpinned ghost stories were also significant in narratives about cinema spectatorship. As such, examining attitudes towards people living in the countryside is crucial to my analysis of discourses surrounding ‘the panicking audience’ and phantom rides. For throughout the nineteenth century, bourgeois and industrialised culture dictated that rural populations were stupid and unable to understand the complexities of modern life. By missing the punchline of middle-​class and urban jokes, people in the countryside were instead the punchline. For instance, in one anecdote in the Hampshire Advertiser, a rube travelling by train towards a town failed to comprehend railway technology. The article read: ‘While a passenger train […] was passing over a bridge a country bumpkin kept putting his head out of the window. “Keep your head inside!” shouted the guard. “Wha’ for?” “For fear you’ll damage the ironwork of the bridge.”’46 The bumpkin, ignorant of railway customs, spoke in dialect to emphasise his difference from the educated guard, and was, by implication, thicker than the bridge’s metal girders. The rube, then, represented a pastoral and increasingly archaic way of life that was at odds with notions of modernity and technological progress. Examples also abound in local newspapers from the 1890s. In a political report in the Carlisle Patriot, countryside people were so gullible that they had ‘staring eyes and mouth wide open’, for they were ready to swallow any argument presented to them.47 And in the Yorkshire Herald, people outside towns were deemed ‘untrustworthy’, without any evidence backing the claim.48 The trend for middle-​class writers to disparage lower-class and 37

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From Steam to Screen countryside people is likely attributable to growing urban populations and improving social conditions, such as to housing and sanitation, that took place in metropolitan areas in the late nineteenth century. Additionally, writing about the Victorian ‘rich and privileged’, David Harvey proposes that the bourgeoisie countered industrialism by ‘developing a distinctive field of culture’ separate from the materialism of the working classes.49 While mechanisation, better working conditions and the idea of ‘mass’ consumption ostensibly democratised leisure, the myth of the idiot rural worker maintained a social hierarchy that benefited the metropolitan middle classes. Further to offering insights about attitudes towards class and urbanism in popular culture, journalists’ reports about hauntings also articulate similarities between ghost seeing and later filmgoing. The communal experiences of hunting for, or watching, supernatural entities prefigured cinema in providing spectacular entertainment for an audience. Indeed, a group of spectators at any given haunted location was necessary to verify that a phantom actually existed in the material world. As the Worcester Chronicle reported, ‘[i]‌t is no wonder, then, that the country folk, brought up to believe the reality of ghosts, should have implicit faith in a tale which several of them could verify from actual experience.’50 Similarly, in the Yorkshire Evening Post story about the demon with the ‘cartwheel’ face, the original ghost seer called upon his employer, pub landlord, village policeman ‘and an ex-​prize-​fighter’ to confirm the spirit’s presence  –​and, for good measure, ‘the party also took with them two cats.’51 The collective sanctioning of spirit sightings was necessary for the stories to circulate, for as Hannah Arednt proposes, ‘appearance  –​something that is seen and heard by others as well as ourselves –​constitutes reality’ in the public sphere.52 Yet the trope of the crowd not only legitimised reports about the material ghost, but also documented a public entertainment that, like theatre and cinema, relied on communal spectatorship and a predilection for the uncanny that transcended class and proximity to the city.

The Phantom Aesthetics of Early Cinema Emerging amid a cultural fascination for ghost stories and seeing, with illusions such as Pepper’s Ghost attracting crowds in urban theatres, and 38

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class phantom sightings drawing audiences in the countryside, early cinema relied on the iconography of the supernatural. In contemporary writing about moving images, critics’ language emphasised film’s connections to the otherworldly –​for example, a journalist at the Daily Mail observed that cinematographs had, in 1895, ‘arisen like magic’.53 The projected moving image had antecedents in optical illusions that drew on horror for sensational effect, such as the magic lantern and phantasmagoria, which featured ghouls and demons that frightened audiences.54 According to Thomas Frost, who recorded the histories of showmen and their performances, the phantasmagoria’s effect on eighteenth-​century audiences was visceral. The exhibitions, performed by ‘spectres, skeletons, and terrific figures’ that ‘suddenly advanced upon the spectators, becoming larger as they approached them,’ led to audiences being ‘not only surprised, but agitated, and many of them were of opinion that they could have touched the figures.’55 Objects that were both material (as part of the apparatus) and otherworldly (appearing to be from beyond the grave) caused alarm among viewers when the creatures moved towards them, which was an illusion that cinema borrowed in the ‘train effect’ pictures. Here I will briefly outline the gothic nature of early film, drawing attention to its simultaneous affinities with both science and the supernatural, to situate ‘train effect’ pictures and phantom rides in a broader history of class-​oriented ghost spectacles. Audiences began watching film shows alongside conjurers, illusionists and clairvoyants.56 Scholars of early film have long discussed the medium’s associations with conjuring and magic theatre, if not with the broader nineteenth-​century penchant for ghost stories. Jon Burrows, for instance, connects showmanship (that is, the theatrical flair that exhibitors deployed to market and sell their screenings) with trickery and illusionism.57 In addition, Andrew Shail likens the processes of projection and reflection that exhibitors used to display films as having an affinity with ‘stage magic apparatuses’.58 Contemporary writers describing cinema at the turn of the century went further still in locating the medium within the aesthetic of the inexplicable by ascribing film with the qualities of actual ghouls, rather than rationalised and stage-​managed phantoms. A report in the Lichfield Mercury, for example, stated that motion pictures were so realistic that 39

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From Steam to Screen ‘seeing is scarcely believing; we feel it easier to imagine ourselves hypnotised into contemplation of some distant passing scene, rather than be gazing upon the mechanical results of photography.’59 The reviewer did not explain the cinematograph’s technical workings. Rather, discourses about hypnotism and illusionism, which were pervasive in the Victorian era, offered a more straightforward rationale for the motion of the onscreen pictures. Reporters also drew on supernatural vocabulary to discuss the men operating the ‘Chronophone’ show in London.60 The World’s Fair portrayed the showmen as being ‘versed in the occult sciences,’ for ‘they hold the means of Raising the Dead to Life, of Making the Dumb to Speak, to call back man from the past, and cause inanimate beings to live.’61 The critic presented cinema as otherworldly because of its ontological and temporal ambiguity, while simultaneously rationalising the medium as an occult ‘science’ produced by two men. Moreover, aspects of the moving image’s aesthetics  –​particularly silence and grey scale  –​further contributed to notions of the screen as a supernatural sight. For example, the London Daily News reviewed ‘a series of phantom realities’ that were ‘painfully and wonderfully silent,’ with the lack of speech and natural sound producing a ‘haunting effect.’62 Indeed, a writer in the St James’s Gazette commented that ‘even more than the lack of the rainbow has been the awful Hades-​like silence of the white and grey phantoms on the sheet.’63 Early film’s ontology thus blurred the boundaries between what was natural and supernatural for audience members who were disconcerted by a cinematic parody of life that was stripped of sound and colour. Film then, as now, indexically records traces of the physical world and yet projects immaterial reproductions that are intangible to spectators; motion pictures capture time and space and play them back in another temporal and spatial setting. For one reviewer in the Star in 1896, cinema’s capacity for storing and re-​storing time was evidence of decay, or ‘congealed moments’.64 In the Manchester Courier and Lancashire Advertiser, a theatre critic read the cinematograph’s ability to record the past in a more positive light, arguing the technology was the ‘philosopher’s stone, so much sought after by our forebears, which now keeps us alive for all time.’65 Both writers, while taking opposing stances on film’s temporal dissonance, 40

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class nevertheless discussed the quality using vocabulary (‘congealed moments’ and ‘philosopher’s stone’) that would not have been out of place in gothic literature. Like ghost stories, cinema negotiated the binary states of realism, with moving images produced through scientific principles, and the fantastic, with impossible spatial and temporal logic playing out on screen. Upholding the notion that film was a rational and mechanised medium, many early showmen promoted their own (often exaggerated) scientific backgrounds, with names such as Professor Morris and Professor John Henry Pepper embedding them in the Victorian tradition of the gentleman amateur lecturer.66 R W Paul, reputedly the first person in Britain to create film apparatus suitable for mass production, was by trade a scientific instrument maker.67 Furthermore, the exhibitors of the first films shown in London, at the Polytechnic Institution, initially housed the auditorium ‘in a small side hall, which at one time was a lecture theatre devoted to chemical discourses and experiments, electrical tricks, and laughing gas demonstrations’.68 Even in psychologist Hugo Münsterberg’s early writings about cinema, the scientific substances that produced moving images, such as ‘glass […] papers, gelatine, celluloid,’ were ‘translucent’ and ‘transparent,’ just like spirit apparitions.69 Films from the period, as well as criticism, demonstrate the aesthetic of the inexplicable because, in addition to emphasising the marvellous, the films draw attention to their ambiguous ontological status and uncanny subjects. One example, The Jonah Man; or, the Traveller Bewitched (1904), tells the story of a man dressing for, and travelling to, work. Featuring a countryside commuter blind to the filmic illusions that hinder him, the picture hinted at the roles that class and urbanism played in determining how people made sense of the inexplicable. For at every stage of the traveller’s preparations, whether putting on clothes, sitting at the breakfast table, or boarding an omnibus, objects move and disappear at will. Yet while the audience see the items disappearing, the character does not: on arriving at a train station, he trips over on the platform and both misses boarding the locomotive and seeing it fade from sight. That the engine vanishes not once, but twice  –​doing so on the second occasion when the traveller is not present –​suggests that the train will always disappear, not because the 41

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From Steam to Screen man is bewitched but because that is the uncanny nature of film and railway technology. However, only the viewer is privileged in witnessing and comprehending the film’s trickery, while the rural traveller is positioned as an ignorant, and at times panicking, participant in the illusion.

Class and the ‘Panicking Audience’ Train effect films, like ghost stories, comprised elements of both the uncanny and the scientific. For example, in an article in the Lichfield Mercury, the cinematograph was ‘an interesting development’ in a longer history of optical illusions, and the reviewer asserted that ‘realism seem[ed] to culminate in the arrival of the railway train.’ So great was the camera’s ability to scientifically observe and replicate natural life that the film was equal to ‘a scene repeated every day at any of the great London termini.’70 Describing the picture, the writer refers to an engine that ‘first appears slowing into the station’, before ‘the ready porters trot along to open the doors, passengers emerge, some fussy with large bags and rugs, others dignified and independent; luggage is claimed and shouldered’.71 The details suggest that the film is L’Arrivée d’un Train à la Ciotat, so claims about realism are pertinent given the actualité’s centrality to myths about the panicking audience. Despite some obvious exaggeration on the part of the journalist about the analogy between the small, countryside Ciotat station and ‘great London termini,’ the quote demonstrates that people understood the film in a rational and representational mode. However, like the skeleton in The Mad Scientist, the narrator in The Signalman, or the disappearing objects in The Jonah Man, the onscreen train simultaneously appeared as both scientific and supernatural. As a reviewer commented after a cinematograph show in Edinburgh, the onscreen crowds that thronged around the recently arrived vehicle were ‘marvellous’ because they were ‘life-​like’.72 In train effect films, then, naturalism not only countered the miraculous, but also fuelled viewers’ perceptions of the pictures as otherworldly. Adding to the impression was the onscreen locomotive’s movement. After rushing towards the audience from the rear to the front of the screen, like a demon in a phantasmagoria show, the engine would inexplicably disappear into space that was neither 42

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class in the camera nor the exhibition space. One writer described ‘a train, running (so to say) out of the cloth,’ which ‘floats upon your vision’ before vanishing.73 The floating locomotive is reminiscent of the gliding ghost in ‘The Story of the Rippling Train’, which underscores the similarities between the dematerialising train and literary spectres of gothic fiction. One of the most widely discussed train effect films in scholarship is The Countryman and the Cinematograph (1901).74 The film features an oncoming engine in a film-​within-​a-​film that plays on the eponymous countryman’s inability to differentiate between actual and onscreen space. The Dundee Evening Courier reported that, in the picture, ‘an old countryman visits a cinematograph entertainment, and the pathetic and romantic subjects so fire his imagination that under their influence he weeps, laughs, dances and fights.’75 In the extant fragment of film, the protagonist stands on stage close to the screen. He dances when a dancer appears, but when he is faced with the train rushing towards him, he panics (see Figure 1.1). Only the locomotive has so sensational an effect on him; it causes him

Figure 1.1  The eponymous ‘countryman’ is scared by the oncoming,

onscreen train in The Countryman and the Cinematograph (R W Paul, 1901). 43

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From Steam to Screen to alternately run in fright and attempt to shoo the vehicle away from him. The latter action emphasises his ignorance, for he fails to understand the logic of the cinema and the train, which would not have turned back or halted even on an actual railway line. His reaction, played for laughs, undermines working-class and rural spectators’ aptitude for negotiating the visual language of cinema. Middle-​class notions about the inferiority of lower-​class spectators were pervasive in the daily press and journals. In an article for the New Review, O Winter briefly acknowledged his own anxieties about the veracity of the onscreen train, yet was quick to accuse the ‘ignorant’ viewer of ‘ancient wonderment.’ Winter’s anecdote about viewing the film includes a bumpkin, who exclaims, ‘[a]‌in’t it lifelike!’, for ‘he possesses the faculty of comparison but roughly developed, and is apt to give an interpretation of reality to the most absurd symbols.’76 The use of the vernacular ‘ain’t’ stressed the class differences between Winter and his target and revealed the social tensions implicit in narratives about early film spectatorship. Jump forward ninety-​eight years and in analysing The Countryman and the Cinematograph, Bottomore rightly identifies that the country ‘rube’ is the film’s punchline. However, his criticism perpetuates the class and location-​ based social hierarchies on which the gag was predicated. Throughout his article Bottomore differentiates between ‘modernised folk who inhabit an urban environment’ and are accustomed to ‘sensationalism’, and the rural and by comparison lower-​class viewers that cannot hope to get the joke.77 Writing about the progressive (technologically aware; modern) versus archaic (uneducated; technologically ignorant) viewer, he claims: The two types of spectator might have reacted very differently to their first sight of films and specifically train films. The one, used to new technology and ‘sensations’, would have laughed the experience off as yet another visual thrill, while the other might have behaved in a more extreme and anxious manner, on occasion perhaps even jumping in fear.78

Bottomore’s distinction between the two classes of filmgoer belies working-​ class and rural leisure activities, such as taking railway journeys or visiting fairgrounds, which provided people with access to modern technological 44

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class and visual culture. Additionally, his prioritising the bourgeois, urban viewer in his analysis supposes that exposure, or indeed overexposure, to new technologies did not cause stress for city-​dwelling spectators. However, as Kern and Schivelbusch point out, industrialisation was a major source of anxiety for urban populations. Bourgeois writers, then, projected their uncertainties about new technologies onto working-class and countryside people both to mask, and validate, their own fears. The railway in particular was a major source of fear about technological developments in the nineteenth century owing to reports of injuries and deaths caused by train crashes and accidents.79 In the serialised ghost story ‘At the Dip in the Road’, the station is more terrifying than any phantom, for the woman narrator who takes refuge ‘in a dark waiting room on the small side line,’ suggests she ‘might have been robbed or murdered, and no one the wiser.’80 And on screen, the R W Paul film A Railway Collision (1898) made explicit the destruction and chaos that accompanied train travel in its depiction of two locomotives colliding and tumbling from a mountainside track.81 The danger of being in proximity to the railway was also evident in The Signalman. When the narrator leaves the hut for the first time, he says: ‘I walked by the side of the down line of rails (with a very disagreeable sensation of a train coming behind me) until I found the path.’82 Moreover, he is so attuned to the sensations of railway travel that he notes ‘a vague vibration in the earth and air, quickly changing into a violent pulsation, and an oncoming rush that caused me to start back, as though it had force to draw me down.’83 The mere suggestion of a passing train is enough to make him physically respond by moving away from the perceived source of danger. Thus the notion that viewers of any class might pull away from the onscreen train –​if not run out of the auditorium  –​is understandable given that people were already adapting their behaviours outside the cinema to the transformed environments of the machine age. The panicking audience narrative also pacified nationalistic, even imperial, apprehensions about modernity, as demonstrated by a report about a screening in Paris. An article in the Pall Mall Gazette records how Chinese statesman Li Hung Chang, on a visit to the French capital, watched a theatre show that included a variety of moving pictures. According to 45

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From Steam to Screen the reporter, Chang enjoyed the programme, which included films of his movements in Paris. However, he was alarmed by a train effect movie. For when a train ‘came dashing into a station,’ the Viceroy of Pechili was made to ‘start from his chair’.84 While Chang held aristocratic status and occupied a position of power, his Chinese identity made him other to the British middle classes. As an outsider, he, too, was apparently liable to make the same mistakes as working-class and rural spectators. Consequently, it appears that the panicking audience narrative has racist, as well as classist, implications that are bound up in the Orientalist discourses used to justify empire.85 While I  am not suggesting that the Viceroy was impervious to the train effect, I  propose that the middle-​ class focus on reporting working-​class and foreign peoples’ responses to the films is indicative of a strategy that ‘othered’ anyone not belonging to the white bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, there are some examples of middle-​class viewers falling victim to cinema’s illusory creation of space and motion in train effect films. An instance of middle-​class anxiety appeared in a tongue-​in-​cheek sketch in Punch, which attributed the panicking audience phenomenon to the educated and well-​off members of the audience. The fictional viewer exclaims:  ‘Wonderful!! But, my eyes! My head!! And the whizzing and the whirling and twittering of nerves, and blinkings and winkings that it causes in not a few among the spectators’.86 At first glance, the satirical article critiques the vanities of panicking middle-​class cinemagoers that considered themselves too well educated to experience the train effect. However, the sketch’s language and tone imply a more specific target, for the melodramatic outbursts (‘my eyes! My head!!’) and reeled-​off list of adjectives (‘whizzing and whirling’ and ‘blinkings and winkings’) indicate a woman’s, or indeed a queer, voice. The ‘twittering of nerves’ alludes to the nineteenth-​century image of the frail, hysterical woman and the plethora of nervous conditions ascribed to women by Victorian doctors. Moreover, the narrator’s call for ‘[r]‌estoratives, quick!’ calls to mind the smelling salts carried by delicate women to prevent fainting.87 Consequently, Punch eviscerates a particular middle-​class viewer that was other to, rather than representative of, the group as a whole, and whose

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class predilection for anxiety made them susceptible to panic when faced with an oncoming, onscreen train. Of course, audiences might also have demonstrated certain behaviours based on what was socially acceptable to their class, meaning working-​class and countryside viewers could visibly demonstrate their panic as part of a melodramatic performance denied to the respectable middle classes. But what usually set the bourgeois spectator apart from others in press reports was their ability to determine what was actually and vicariously experienced within the auditorium. In similar rhetoric to that surrounding working class and countryside people believing in real ghosts, reports suggested that while lower-​class viewers could not discern a real from a recorded train, middle-​class spectators instinctively recognised one from the other. As Bobby demonstrates in the children’s story The Cinematograph Train, even young people attending a moving picture show for the first time could tell the difference. That the young boy is middle class is evidenced by his inhabiting a designated playroom within his parents’ house and his exclamation of ‘[o]‌h jolly!’ when his cousin announces a trip to the film theatre.88 During the show, Bobby watches a train film in which a locomotive emerges from a tunnel. The engine went ‘rushing along at a rare rate, till finally it tore into the station, stopping just in time, so Bobby thought, to prevent the terrible accident which must have occurred had it gone a little further forward and crashed among the audience.’89 Following his apparent confusion about the materiality of the filmic railway, Bobby falls asleep and dreams himself inside the vehicle, and the ensuing story follows his adventures on the ‘cinematograph train.’ But, as Shail argues, the bourgeois child knows that the train is illusory. The story relies on the principle that ‘it is only those who have a fancy for believing in what they know to be fanciful who can transport themselves onto the train.’90 It is Bobby’s ability as an educated, middle-​class boy to recognise fantasy and yet simultaneously suspend disbelief in order to participate in the cinemagoing experience without panic. Bobby, unlike the bumpkin in The Countryman and the Cinematograph, is privileged in ascertaining what is real and what is not.

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From Steam to Screen

Phantom Rides and Rural Modernity Alongside Bobby’s bourgeois upbringing, his urban environment facilitates him understanding how to read film the very first time he visits the picture house. His living in a metropolitan area, and unremarkable journey to the theatre in a motor car, indicate that he is familiar with the spectacle and rhythms of modernity. Moving images, therefore, are easily comprehensible within the machinated framework of Bobby’s everyday life. Yet Bobby’s fantastical adventure on the train transplants him to a rural, feudal landscape inhabited by kings, queens, and magical creatures that is far away from the industrial world of the car and the movie theatre. The narrative, moving from the town to the countryside, therefore follows the same path as the phantom ride films that became popular in the early twentieth century. The Cinematograph Train, which begins with the train rushing towards Bobby before the boy gets on the vehicle, coincides with a similar aesthetic shift in railway films. For by the turn of the century, the so-​ called phantom ride, which offered viewers a disembodied railway journey through both urban and rural landscapes, was becoming fashionable. Scholarship about the interconnections between the railway and early cinema, and debates about the panicking audience, tend to focus on images of locomotives moving towards the camera, screen and audience. Certainly, evidence indicates that regardless of viewers’ class or the veracity of claims that cinemagoers ran from auditoriums, train effect films caused a sensation among spectators. However, as Charles Musser indicates, the phantom ride substituted the train effect when the initial novelty wore off, and so offered an extension of the aesthetic rather than an entirely original one.91 While the phantom ride did not elicit the shock of the new so viscerally as the onward-​rushing engine, the films did inspire strong physical and psychological responses from audiences. By disembodying the spectator, who journeyed along the railway tracks positioned on and as the train, the phantom ride simultaneously cast viewers as the seemingly autonomous machine and a ghostly apparition floating above the earth. Just as in the ghost stories that abounded throughout the nineteenth century, the ‘phantom’ ride was predicated on tensions between the scientific and irrational, and the urban and rural. The films 48

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class transported spectators between built-​up and agrarian spaces, and between the architectures of the past and present; much like the train effect, the phantom ride disoriented viewers. In doing so, the new incarnation of railway picture revealed not only the ongoing fascination among audiences for ghosts and spectacle, but also the railway’s role in expanding modernity into rural areas. Thus I argue that the phantom ride’s continuous motion through connected city and countryside landscapes, and depiction of the telegraph and railway track extending into pastoral areas, undermines the bourgeois notion of the cinematically illiterate country bumpkin unfamiliar with modern technology. As initial excitement about train effect films wore off, phantom rides quickly gained popularity with reviewers, and, by 1898, the novelties were subject to numerous articles. In March 1898, the South Wales Echo was reporting that the ‘celebrated phantom ride’ was ‘not to be missed’ at theatres.92 Also in 1898, another writer in Grantham in the north of England claimed that ‘the finest picture [on the programme] was The Phantom Ride depicting, with extraordinary fidelity, the progress of a railway journey,’ with ‘stations, signal-​boxes, bridges, tunnel, etc., being visibly portrayed.’93 Meanwhile on the southern island of Jersey, a spectator writing in a local newspaper described a phantom ride film as the ‘gem of the series from its novelty and originality of conception.’94 That all three writers, positioned at the extreme ends of Britain, and distant from London (albeit in possibly industrial areas), were able to watch and report on the newest spectacle confirms that the films quickly circulated beyond the metropolis. Moreover, the language used by the reporter in Jersey –​the most agrarian and isolated of the three locations –​ acknowledges the frictions between the rational and the uncanny that, like the train effect films, underpinned critics’ responses to the phantom ride. The reviewer described how the picture: is mysteriously entitled The Phantom Ride –​A Weird Spectacle, and, as in taking this photograph the camera was placed on the front of an engine travelling at 50 miles an hour, the result can be better imagined than described. Suffice it to say the imaginary traveller –​for a very realistic sensation is produced –​is taken whizzing past grand scenery, under bridges and finally

49

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From Steam to Screen through a tunnel […] The apparent movement of the rapidly-​ passing landscape is so realistic that it creates peculiar feelings in the onlookers, and the picture is loudly applauded.95

The likely middle-​class, yet countryside dwelling, writer is astute enough to determine that the spectator is an ‘imaginary traveller’ that journeys vicariously through the filmic landscape, and that movement is merely ‘apparent’. As a result, the report avoids any allusion to countryside rubes being fooled by the picture’s illusionism. And, while the writer comments on the ‘whizzing’ of the speeding vehicle and its realism (two elements of the phantom ride that maintained the style of the train effect films), the phantom ride appears to cause the viewer uneasiness, rather than shock or dismay. Travelling on, or above, the moving train created an uncanny sensation. The ghostly moniker ‘phantom’ ride was amplified by the subtitle ‘weird spectacle’, and the writer’s assertion that the film was ‘mysterious’ and created ‘peculiar feelings’ among viewers further indicated a supernatural element. Nevertheless, the film received applause and there is no indication that any member of the rural audience, regardless of class, was unable to make sense of the new rendering of motion on screen. One explanation for the phantom ride’s uncanny effect on viewers was the ghostly, gliding sensation that the films reproduced. The floating spirit that moved without having to make use of bodily mechanics (such as walking or running) was a common trope in ghost stories that spoke to cultural anxieties about machines that were beyond human comprehension. For example, in ‘The Story of the Rippling Train,’ the phantom defies gravity and moves unnaturally; it ‘kept gliding, rippling […] not jerkily or irregularly, but glidingly and smoothly.’96 Reputedly ‘real’ ghosts glided, too, such as one sighted in Hampshire, where the spirit was ‘reported to have been seen gliding about the upper portion of the house.’97 Edith Nesbit also created a chilling effect in a short, gothic story by emphasising the uncanny nature of railway technology and the train’s non-​human motion. She wrote that the vehicle ‘began to glide, to the accompaniment of the fog signals, through the blue gloom of electric light struggling through the fog.’98 Nesbit’s tale, which relies on the train’s fundamental eeriness to suggest supernatural occurrences are about to take place, offers a literary 50

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class antecedent for the phantom ride, which made visual the locomotive-​as-​ apparition metaphor. In the films, the camera is frequently attached to the front of the engine so that the audience is positioned hovering above the tracks, seemingly without a material presence to root it to the earth. Throughout the cycle, pictures such as Railway Ride Over the Tay Bridge (1897), View from an Engine Front –​Barnstaple (1898), and Phantom Ride on the Furness Railway (1900) all emphasised otherworldly railway architectures including the track, junctions, signal huts and bridges, that omitted human experience.99 Yet because the camera also excluded the locomotive’s existence from the tracking shot, viewers experienced the journey from the perspective of a mysterious ‘other,’ or apparition. Many of the railway objects and buildings lining the track in phantom rides would have been familiar to spectators who were also accustomed to being passengers. However, the new point of view offered by the tracking shot rendered the recognisable strange while simultaneously eliding usually distinct spaces together in a visual stream of motion. Contrary to suggestions in the daily press that the city and countryside were distinct environments inhabited by different types of people, phantom rides depicted a world in which urban and rural landscapes were continuous and indistinct. As one phantom ride reviewer noted, the films showed a variety of stations and man-​made objects, ‘as well as the country in the vicinity of the railway.’100 While the onscreen trains often began their journeys at stations, or, as in A Trip on the Metropolitan Railway (1910), in built-​up areas, the vehicles quickly moved into pastoral regions that only fleetingly featured man-​made architectures between fields and trees.101 In the film, there are aesthetic distinctions between the bricks, chimneys and advertisement hoardings of London’s suburban sprawl and the natural, open spaces on the city’s peripheries. Simultaneously, the engine-​mounted camera reveals the seemingly infinite railway track extending through both environments, accompanied by telegraph poles and wires, and ever more stations, which create connections between the metropolis and countryside –​literally along the Metropolitan line (see Figure 1.2). Other examples include Train Entering and Exiting a Tunnel (1899), which depicted a locomotive travelling through a tunnel into a clearing of fields and trees, and The Arlberg Railway (1906), which revealed railway architectures that extended into a mountainous, gothic Austrian 51

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From Steam to Screen landscape.102 Phantom rides, therefore, visually reproduced modernity’s expansion from the city to more rural areas and indicated that technological advancement was not confined to an urban experience. In addition, the pictures presented the railway journey as never-​ending, with trains running through stations and films ending without the locomotive reaching a fixed destination. For instance, in Wexford Railway Station (1902), the train continually moves and there is no terminus, as if the vehicle is trapped in a liminal (or, as Michel Foucault calls it, ‘heterotopian’) space.103 In Railway Ride Over the Tay Bridge, the engine starts at a station. However, the train passes by stations and huts further down the line without pausing, and so continues its journey into an unknown, and uninhabited, space. The lack of narrative resolution alludes to modernity’s unceasing spread and technology’s ability to function without human intervention. Moreover, the phantom ride’s perpetual motion implies that the audience’s

Figure 1.2  The railway, a symbol of modernity, stretches into a rural envi-

ronment and so collapses the distance between urban and pastoral space in Metropolitan Railway (1910). 52

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class encounter with the railway occurs in a new, machine-​oriented time unrestricted by human conditions such as work time, leisure time, and night and day. As a result, the phantom ride is spatially and temporally located in an otherworldly, and ghost-​like, environment, which likely contributed to viewers’ uneasiness when watching the films. Hence the countryside is not only a site of modernity, but also one of haunting. Like ghost stories from the period, the phantom ride imbued the rural with a ghostly quality and provided spectators with a kind of gothic tourism that enabled people to indulge their enjoyment of the uncanny. In some phantom-​ride pictures, filmmakers interwove haunting and heritage to provide visually spectacular entertainment for audiences. For example, in Conwy Castle –​Panoramic View of Conwy on the L.&N.W. Railway (1898, hereafter Conwy Castle) the camera glided like a modern ghost through the medieval architecture of the Welsh fort, with the structure’s gothic turrets, crenulations and tunnels providing a ready-​made, theatrical backdrop for the phantom ride.104 The historic castle is both juxtaposed with contemporary cinema and railway technology and, through being filmed, repurposed as part of the leisure and entertainment industry. A similar effect occurs in Phantom Ride on the Furness Railway (1900), which relies on the ruins of the haunted-​house-​like Furness Abbey for spectacle, as the train shifts between the iconography of the old and new. Just as Schivelbusch proposes that on actual railway journeys ‘[t]‌he landscape appeared behind the telegraph poles and wires; it was seen through them’, so too the past is glimpsed through modern technology in phantom rides.105 The effect of the constantly transforming landscapes in phantom rides led one writer to describe the disorienting sensation of railway architectures and the natural world blurring into one another. In Punch, a reviewer wrote that ‘all the country round takes it into its head to follow as hard as ever it can, rocks, mountains, trees, towns, gateways, castles, rivers, landscapes, bridges, platforms, telegraph-​poles, all whirling and squirling and racing against one another.’106 An article in the Stage further supported the notion that the fluid and ever-​changing scenery disturbed spectators, suggesting that ‘[t]‌he passing through tunnels creates quite a curious impression on one.’107 Moreover, phantom rides bewildered viewers by 53

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From Steam to Screen incorporating sporadic jump-​cut editing that propelled the camera, and by association, the spectator, along the track and into new locations seemingly without physical cause. One film that deployed the technique was Railway Ride Over the Tay Bridge, in which the vehicle, or camera-​mounted apparition, appears to defy human experience. Another, The Arlberg Railway, features a number of edited sequences that emphasise the fluctuating temporal and spatial conditions of rail travel, which both condensed and expanded time and space. The picture also uses pans and tilts to create the illusion that the camera, while disembodied, is sentient and autonomous. Thus phantom rides, unlike train effect films, did not rely on railway aesthetics and cinema’s shock of the new to affect audiences. Instead, the pictures experimented with, and developed, filmic language through camera movements and editing that impacted how viewers responded. On the one hand, the aesthetics of phantom rides reinforced notions about haunted and isolated pastoral environments by way of castles and gothic architectures. On the other, the pictures simultaneously incorporated the agrarian into a narrative about ever-​expanding modernity and advertised ghost tourism to spectators who were also potential passengers. In doing so, phantom rides situated transport and leisure economies firmly within the parameters of the rural, which undermined bourgeois notions about countryside people being absent from, and thus ignorant of, urban experiences of technology. Indeed, When the Devil Drives (1907), an early narrative short that draws on the phantom ride to create a fantastical railway journey, interweaves metropolitan and natural spectacles and depicts onscreen passenger-​spectators whose class and ability to understand their surroundings are ambiguous.108 The film initially imitates a train effect picture, as it focuses on an ostensibly middle-​class family boarding a second-​ class carriage at a train station. Viewers witness the locomotive entering and departing the platform. The film’s main claim to spectacle, though, relies on the Devil, as well as sequences using models, to show the vehicle’s progress through dreamlike landscapes, and shots aimed inside the coaches through the windows. Under the Devil’s guidance, the train leaves the tracks and miraculously travels along telegraph wires, an occurrence that indicates the connections, albeit inexplicable, between the railway, cinema and other modern 54

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class communication technologies. The vehicle –​a ghost train in all but name –​ then charges off the telegraph wires and plunges into the sea. As a reviewer in the Stage described, ‘the train is then jumped into swirling water, where, in defiance of all natural laws, the journey is continued under the sea.’109 The lack of railway architecture does not hinder the cinematic Devil, who carries on the journey through rural geographies that are entirely unnatural for the machine and its passengers. Nevertheless, the second-​ class family appear at their window pointing at passing flora and fauna and marvelling at their strange, yet seemingly ordinary, journey. Rather than display upset at their flying along telegraph wires or plunging under water, the passengers merely accept the incidents as part of the experience of travel; it is as if cinema, with its jumps, cuts and ability to transcend time and space, has prepared them for the encounter. Hence the family are in some ways comparable to Bobby in The Cinematograph Train; they indulge in fantasy because they know the experience to be fantastical. However, there is no explicit indication in the film that the middle-​class passengers can distinguish between the real and imaginary. Unlike Bobby, the family do not disembark from the remarkable train or acknowledge that the journey has any extraordinary quality. Consequently, When the Devil Drives is equivocal in its representation of class and people’s ability to comprehend the machinated, modern world.

Railways and Countryside Cinematograph Shows When the Devil Drives alludes to questions of class and cinema literacy by depicting a bourgeois family being immersed in, and unquestioning of, the onscreen display. Yet the film’s racing and loop-​the-​looping train also evokes a modern apparatus that countryside and working-​class people would have been familiar with beyond the auditorium: the fairground ride. Outside the movie theatre, travelling shows toured the country and gave rural and working-​class spectators access to new technology. Fairgrounds, which combined elements of the supernatural and the railway in track-​ based thrill rides, alongside mobile cinemas, provided spectacle and mechanised motion at least equal to, if not surpassing, that available to people in metropolitan areas. I argue, therefore, that the fairground offers an antidote 55

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From Steam to Screen to narratives that privilege urban, middle-​class viewers at the expense of working-​class and panicking countryside audiences.110 In the early twentieth century, there were a variety of public discourses about the links between the city and the countryside. Henry Asquith, MP for East Fife in Scotland (and later Prime Minister), proposed that owing to the lure of factory work in manufacturing towns, the nation was suffering from ‘rural depopulation’.111 The railways facilitated this flow by moving people from agrarian to industrial sites, and Schivelbusch argues that, as a result, the rail network destroyed unique and isolated communities by joining them to a larger, metropolitan network.112 Contemporary discussions about the expanding transport system also tended to suggest that the distinctions between the rural and urban were shrinking (as workers found it easier to relocate) or blurring (with remote villages losing their identity through proximity to bigger towns). Even in ghost stories, the countryside was represented as a setting for paranormal events that in turn served as metaphors for cultural anxieties about urban mechanisation. Bourgeois reports about country rubes being taken in by ghost stories, or failing to negotiate trains or cinemas in the intended fashion, are therefore at odds with a broader trend that saw metropolitan and pastoral areas become more alike, rather than distinct. Fairgrounds in particular provided a meeting point between elements of the supernatural and modern, the old and new, and the agrarian and industrial. Fairs took place in towns and pastoral villages, and while attendees represented diverse social backgrounds, the ruling classes perpetuated the idea that the amusements provided entertainment ‘for poor people’.113 Alongside ghost shows, fairs featured ‘dark rides’ and haunted houses that would have prepared visitors for the visual and kinetic sensations of cinema. Supporting the proposition, a contemporary writer in the Era situated the cinematograph in the tradition of both the fairground and the ghost story. He argued that the Bioscope was ‘the evolution of the portable theatre, through its progressive stages of mumming booth, panorama, or mechanical show, to the ghost illusion’.114 Other fairground attractions drew on the same fascination for science and the inexplicable that was crucial to ghost stories. For instance, in Aberdare, Wales, a so-​called Professor Lloyd presented himself as a 56

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class modern man of science; simultaneously his scientific persona rendered him uncanny, for he was also known as ‘the Welsh Wizard, with up-​to-​date mysteries’.115 Furthermore, fairs abounded with clairvoyants and mediums such as Syko, who could ‘cause his mind to travel through space to any part of the world, and while so absent from the body […] clearly explain any person or place on whom his mind has been directed by the celebrity hypnotist.’116 Syko’s capacity to be simultaneously present and absent preceded cinema’s ability to situate audiences both in the auditorium and in a space beyond the screen, while claims about his mind ‘travelling through space’ drew on scientific wave theory. Thus the amusement interwove the rationality of the machine age with the marvellous and astonishing trickery of the entertainment industry. The connections between thrill rides and early films are evident on screen in pictures such as When the Devil Drives and Phantom Ride on the Furness Railway (1900), in which the speed of the camera, and the vicariously moving spectator, is disorienting.117 In addition, actualités including Devil’s Dyke Fun Fair (1896), A Switchback Railway (1898), and Les Montagnes Russes, Blackpool’s Latest Attraction (1902), directly depicted track-​ based fairground rides, and used the fast-​ moving and visually impressive Russian Mountains, or Switchbacks, to entertain film audiences.118 Indeed, the aesthetics of the railway were embedded in the fairground. At Stockport, for example, railway carriers advertised their train services on the sides of lorries.119 A military exhibition at Earl’s Court in London featured attractions that were situated between railway tracks, and a ‘Liliputian’ train that ‘traverse[d]‌a considerable portion of the gardens.’120 And fairground rides, such as the Tunnel Railway at Fraserburgh Links, and the scenic railway imported from the USA’s Coney Island to Blackpool, reimagined the locomotive in an entertainment context.121 Josephine Kane proposes that at the turn of twentieth century, entertainments at amusement parks were ‘[d]‌rawing on the legacy of modern spectacle,’ and ‘defined by their machine landscapes and [the] technologically produced sensations they offered.’122 While travelling fairs provided smaller-​scale attractions than permanent leisure parks, the shows similarly combined visual marvels and motion. Indeed, Mervyn Heard argues that the ghost show was eventually superseded by the fairground 57

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From Steam to Screen Bioscope, and was ‘embraced by the new medium,’ for ‘[s]emblances of the ghost-​show abound in the works of the early filmmakers’.123 Heard’s claim suggests that the experience of watching moving pictures offered continuity to countryside audiences used to the excitements and shocks of fairground exhibition. Like the ghost show moving picture, projected moving images in Britain were first exhibited in London. However, following the first screening in the capital in February 1896, it took just three months for film exhibition to reach more geographically peripheral towns and cities such as Grimsby, Leicester, Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester.124 And, from its earliest incarnation, cinema’s showmen and actualités fixed film exhibition in a tradition of travel. Burrows’s history of London nickelodeons demonstrates the transitory nature of early film exhibition, with moving images absorbed into local environments wherever there was space, including in shops and railway arches.125 Toulmin also describes how early showmen transported their Bioscopes by train in order to visit ‘largely provincial audiences whose chances of seeing [these] new display[s]‌were limited’ and be assured of making a profit.126 One such Bioscope is visible in the Mitchell and Kenyon picture Whitsuntide Fair at Preston (1906), in which Green’s Cinematograph is located amid fairground rides including a carousel and swing boats.127 The portable theatre’s ornate frontage featured gilded statues and three archways, which gave the impression of entering through tunnels, or a viaduct. Both showmen and the middle classes were encouraged to invest in portable cameras and projectors because there was money to be made in expanding the cinema’s reach. In 1896, an advertisement appeared in the Manchester Guardian for ‘[v]‌itascopes… [c]inematographs or [a]nimatographs’. The complete set –​a vitascope, screen, stand, lamp and instructions –​promised showmen a ‘grand money earner’.128 Priced at sixty-​five pounds, with films costing extra, the portable cinema was not for the ordinary working-​class citizen. The mobile film theatre was an investment opportunity; that people in remote locations would get to see the invention was incidental to the advertisers’ aims. Nevertheless, there is evidence that people encountered moving images even beyond locations accessible by railway. In a memoir written by exhibitor James MacKenzie, he describes 58

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class showing films to remote farmers at a time when many urban dwellers had not yet seen a moving picture.129 As a business venture, there is evidence that buying a portable projector was successful. The cinema’s popularity at travelling shows is demonstrated by one attendee’s diary entry about Nottingham Goose Fair in 1898. Sydney Race’s account of the event indicates that a quarter of the attractions featured Bioscopes or moving images, with five out of twenty spectacles including film.130 And at a showmen’s meeting in 1898, the Daily Mail noted that cinematograph operators such as Randall Williams appeared surprisingly wealthy, and caustically suggested the fairground was ‘offering desirable careers for the upper classes.’131 According to film historians Rachael Lowe and Roger Manvell, showmen with projectors ‘acquired considerable wealth […] Some even had their own organs, electricity dynamos, and elaborate pavilions with gilded fronts, sloping floors, plush drapings and seats for anything up to four or five hundred people.’ As such, their exhibitions rivalled any in urban theatres and were ‘technically first class.’132 For showmen to successfully attract audiences to their entertainments, it was imperative that their apparatus represented the most advanced on the market. As a ‘Chronophone’ advertisement in World’s Fair demonstrates, fairground film technology had to develop at a rapid pace (see Figure 1.3).133 In the commercial, a wooden shack depicts a Bioscope that offers ‘all the latest films’ for a one-​penny entry fee. Yet the crowds flock instead to the Chronophone, where ‘[t]‌alking, singing and musical animated pictures’ are housed in an ornate theatre with flashing electric lights. It is likely that the films screened in the travelling theatres were the same as those shown in music halls and other permanent auditoriums, too. Touring showmen had access to, and rented film from, the same catalogues provided by Gaumont or Méliès for urban picture houses, although fairground shows were likely to last only one reel (fifteen minutes), as opposed to two hours in a theatre.134 The playbill for a performance by Jasper Redfern, a well-​known showman who toured the north of England, in 1898, announces a programme consisting of the ‘Butterfly dance in colours; terminating with the sensational phantom train ride through tunnels, etc.’135 That the ‘sensational’ railway film is listed in 1898, when records in 59

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Figure 1.3  A cartoon in World’s Fair reveals that new technology was just

as important at countryside shows as in the metropolis. See World’s Fair, ‘Chronophone,’ March 30, 1907.

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class the daily press suggest phantom rides were popularised in city theatres, indicates that viewers in peripheral towns and villages were encountering the pictures at the same time as their urban-​dwelling counterparts. Contrary to the narrative disseminated in the Countryman and the Cinematograph, rural audiences had many opportunities to witness locomotives moving on screen. For example, at a fair near Wrexham, in north Wales, one viewer reported attending a spectacular film entitled The Train Wreckers.136 And alongside the ubiquitous phantom ride, travelling film exhibitors also showed travelogues that presented spectators with scenes from famous British railway journeys. The Great Northern Railway Company produced films for the cinematograph of ‘Scotch and English scenery’ and advertised the pictures to showmen in the fairground trade paper the World’s Fair.137 As in phantom rides, which featured tourist attractions such as Conwy Castle, the Great Northern’s railway films took advantage of cinema’s ability to mediate perhaps unaffordable journeys while simultaneously promoting the company’s line. Showmen could also hire or produce their own ‘locals,’ which were actualités featuring locations and residents from the surrounding area that drew audiences keen to see themselves on screen.138 Railway works were popular sites for shooting locals, with films such as Employees Leaving Furness Railway Works, Barrow (1901), and Employees Leaving North Eastern Engine Works, Gateshead (1901), portraying hundreds of workers pouring out of the buildings at the end of their shifts.139 Filming the pictures at rail sheds and factories provided exhibitors with a huge potential audience for local shows –​and, now, indicates the enormous scale of Britain’s rail industries. As well as exposing countryside viewers to new optical technologies and images of the railway, fairground cinematograph shows materially relied on the rail network to transport both potential spectators and film apparatuses. During a period in which Britain’s domestic tourism economy was expanding, and new legislation provided people with greater distinctions between employment and leisure time, the train offered working-class and rural passengers connections to fairs and public holiday celebrations. For instance, in 1897, the Grantham Journal celebrated both the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, and the Great Northern Railway, services that enabled residents near Grimsby to attend film shows at the Industrial 61

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From Steam to Screen and Fine Art Exhibition.140 Ten years later, at the Birmingham Fair in 1907, the World’s Fair reported that there were ‘three local railways running into the town,’ with ‘no fewer than forty-​eight excursion trains from all parts of the country.’141 And, although the plans did not materialise, at Shoreham on the south coast, the local council was collaborating with the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway to create a new ‘residential working-​class community’ and rail sheds that would serve a permanent fairground and amusement park.142 Consequently, the bourgeois caricature of the rube that could not properly use the railway appears to be an imagined figure that served to entrench class hierarchies when technological expansion threatened to undermine the exclusivity of middle-​class and urban experiences. Showmen also depended on the railway to transport Bioscopes and other equipment across the country. Correspondence between filmmaker and exhibitor Jasper Redfern, and his assistant Fred Holmes, reveals how countryside shows relied on trains for the distribution of film reels and projectors in the burgeoning cinema industry. Redfern wrote to Holmes: ‘I have just had a telegram from Thomas, asking me to go to Glasgow with a lot of films, and if you could get back in time, I could take those you have got with you.’143 To ensure Redfern reached Glasgow, it was imperative that Holmes caught an earlier than planned train back to Sheffield to complete the handover of material. The letters also reveal that rail timetables had a direct impact on exhibition practices, with Redfern encouraging Holmes to ‘show earlier on Saturday night’ so as to make the last train service and avoid being stranded until the Sunday.144 Alongside Redfern, Randall Williams, one of the first showmen to incorporate film into his entertainments, booked special train services to carry his goods between fairs.145 When touring exhibitors became concerned about the likely impact on their profits of railway fare increases, Williams ‘hustled’ with the operators –​suggesting his business was significant to their revenue –​and fought a ‘charge and condition contrary to Traveller’s interests.’146 There were instances when the practicalities of transporting cinema apparatus by train resulted in the damage or destruction of Bioscopes, particularly when embers from engines set highly flammable celluloid and wooden structures alight.147 However, in general, the railway was an efficient conveyance for portable cinematograph shows and for showmen, 62

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class too, who sometimes converted carriages into mobile living quarters.148 Furthermore, evidence suggests that filmmakers converted rail coaches into developing laboratories to speed up the dissemination of newsreels and locals depicting events of public interest. Toulmin proposes that the rapidity with which Mitchell and Kenyon shot and distributed films suggests they had a portable film-​development unit.149 And, in 1907, newsreel producers printed and developed footage of the royal family in Wales while on a train to theatres in London.150 That the pictures were filmed in Wales, a typically rural environment peripheral to the metropolitan capital, and were travelling between the countryside and the city, demonstrates that cinema was not only circulating from the urban centre outward, but also in other myriad ways across the country. Based on the fairground’s incorporation of the cinematograph, the railway, and ghosts, and the material intersections of mechanisation ­ and leisure in rural environments, the representation of the yokel in Countryman and the Cinematograph appears a gross exaggeration. The diary of Sydney Race demonstrates this, as his report on seeing ‘living pictures’ suggests that he understood film as a technological development of the Kinetoscope. On watching a train film, he notes that it ‘was funny to see a door open and a lady and gentleman jump out, apparently from a flat surface containing nothing’, but did not record any sense of panic about what he knew (for the effect is only ‘apparent’) to be an illusion.151 Supporting Race’s demonstration of cinema literacy, while trade newspapers claimed moving pictures were ‘so life-​like and real as to compel one’s admiration and astonishment’, the rhetoric of realism was no different to that found in national and London-​based presses.152 Like their middle-​class and urban counterparts in The Cinematograph Train, pastoral spectators could suspend disbelief and acknowledge distinctions between fantasy and actuality. Yet the trope of the countryside rube at the fairground persisted in bourgeois publications aimed at metropolitan readers. For instance, in Hull, a humorous report recorded a yokel’s visit to the cinematograph. The article read: ‘A countryman wanted two seats at the theatre the other evening. “Stalls?” asked the ticket seller. “Stalls! Do you think we’re cattle?” roared the countryman, “give us two cushioned seats.”’153 The Manchester Guardian took a more nuanced position regarding fairgrounds and film 63

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From Steam to Screen exhibition, however the paper’s alleged interview with a showman continued to poke fun at the uneducated, rural traveller. Undermining reports about the cinematograph’s popularity among showmen for its ability to generate profit, the anecdotal account suggests that motion pictures denigrated the fairground proprietor’s ‘art’. The interviewee complains that ‘those cynemetographs is all the go: ‘igh Art is nowhere. It needs a memory does ‘igh Art. What memory does a cynemetograph require? –​except to remember where you put the slides the last time you packed up. It’s a desperate age, this is.’154 Of course, actors and other fairground performers may have been negatively affected by the nascent film industry and found their talents overlooked as audiences turned instead to the projected image. However, the interviewee’s working-​class dialect and mournful attitude, and reference to fairground amusements as ‘high art’ encouraged elitist readers to laugh at the showman’s apparent misunderstanding of what constituted art and his despair at technological advances. The tendency to ridicule working-​class and rural audiences was commonplace in urban-​based newspapers. But, less frequently, the showman’s trade paper World’s Fair did lampoon the middle classes. The publication’s inversion of the rube joke demonstrates that anxieties about the effects of mass consumption and industrialisation on regional identity were not confined to the bourgeoisie. In one article, a reporter claims that a financier saw an actor on screen that owed him money, and so began shouting at the projected image demanding that he pay the debt. Even when the exhibitor challenged the angry man and explained the illusion, the spectator continued to disrupt the performance in the hope of recovering his money.155 Whereas middle-​ class filmmakers and writers suggested countryside yokels could not understand mechanisation to emphasise their own, self-​projected intelligence, rural media focused on the perceived greed of the elites to give credence to a working-​class way of life. Films produced for fairground audiences also lambasted middle-​class pretensions, with Landing at Low Tide (c1896) deriving humour from a well-​dressed woman tourist being repeatedly tipped into the sea by her husband and a sailor.156 Thus, despite the prevalence of bourgeois narratives about cinemagoing in the daily press, class impacted ideas about how viewers behaved in both urban and rural, and permanent and travelling, theatres. Resisting 64

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class the uniformity of experience that the expanding railway and mechanically reproduced images offered to passengers and spectators across the country, working-​class, fairground audiences also played on class differences to reinforce their own values.

Conclusion Whatever the legitimacy of claims about panicking audiences, train effect films gained popularity with both urban and rural, bourgeois and working-​class audiences, and shaped film language. Compared to other early pictures such as Annabelle Butterfly Dance (1894), Boxing Kangaroo (1895), or New Bar Room (1895), which all relied on proscenium arch staging and a static camera, it is no wonder that the motion implicit in railway films was unsettling for spectators.157 Unlike the theatre, boxing-​ring, or tavern, the locomotive brought a dynamism and sensation of speed to the screen that was as new to metropolitan viewers as to fairground attendees. Based on the universality of the railway film’s capacity to shock spectators, I argue that we can attribute discourses about panicking audiences and ignorant rubes to class conflicts that underpinned people’s experiences of mechanisation and mass consumption. While there are examples in the daily press of reviewers describing their own uneasiness when watching train effect pictures, class is a significant consideration that film scholars have overlooked when examining early cinemagoing. Consequently, I argue that middle-​class responses to rail films sought to conceal bourgeois anxieties about the technological transformations of modernity in urban environments, and simultaneously legitimise cinemagoing as an erudite activity that required visual literacy. Whereas cartoons, anecdotes and reviews all suggested that working-​class spectators and country rubes had no place in the metropolitan auditorium, evidence also indicates that they routinely visited theatres. A Hull film programme in 1902 advertised two evening performances beginning at seven and nine respectively, so that ‘[c]‌ountry patrons and early risers will find the advantage of the early show. City patrons and businessmen will find the advantage of the late show.’158 Rural audiences, then, did travel into the city and watch motion pictures in permanent cinemas, as well as attending 65

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From Steam to Screen travelling shows. Between 1897 and 1914, at least one hundred and twenty-​ eight exhibitors toured film apparatus in Britain and provided an extensive network of performance sites.159 Moreover, the Bioscopes that toured fairgrounds could, as Green’s Cinematograph Exhibition asserted, ‘vie with the best entertainment of a similar character in the largest halls in the city, and that is saying something’.160 Hence working-​class, countryside viewers had ample opportunity to encounter new developments in optical technology and experience film spectatorship alongside people in towns and cities. Indeed, Lowe argues that ‘[i]t is to the fairground showmen that the cinema owes its ultimate success’.161 Travelling cinemas, which remained successful until the First World War, provided motion pictures with a changing, yet constant, audience, which helped guarantee the medium’s development as mass entertainment. That middle-​class writers tended to disparage working-​class viewers was symptomatic of fears about increasing homogeneity arising from the perceived democratisation of British society owing to the rise of mass culture. As the railway connected major cities with isolated villages, and the cinema enabled all attendees to travel vicariously to faraway and previously unreachable destinations, traditional markers of social status collapsed. Hence the rhetoric of middle-​class, educated writers asserted that bourgeois notions of education and taste had to rescue film from working-​ class culture. One reviewer, reflecting on cinema’s origins, suggested that ‘[w]‌hat independent cinematograph shows we had were managed largely –​ although by no means exclusively –​by men who catered for the lowest tastes of the adolescent shop boy and servant girl’. The writer continued: ‘the independent shows were usually very cheap and very poor […] the outfit was second rate, the pictures badly shown, and the subjects chosen were often of the most undesirable type’.162 Class prejudice, and a desire to validate one’s own position within the social hierarchy, was therefore central to thinking about film spectatorship during the medium’s infancy. As Brad Beaven argues, middle-​class reformers in the late ​nineteenth century feared whether ‘their own prized civilised culture would survive the onslaught of modernity. This modernity came in the guise of rapidly growing cities, rising poverty and expansion of “low” forms of leisure’ –​ such as cinema.163 However, by the time Britain entered the First World 66

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Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class War in 1914, the lampooning of the working classes had begun to disappear from narratives about film audiences, as the state recognised the medium’s potential for propaganda. As the nation prepared for, and entered, the conflict, the patriotic and working-​class Tommy became a celebrated figure in British culture as the government attempted to garner support for the military campaign. Newsreels soon glorified working-​class people on screen to validate the nation’s war strategy and reassure anxious audiences about new, technological forms of fighting. Similarly, stories about the panicking audience and train effect served as an earlier form of propaganda in a class war between groups uncertain about the impact of modernity on their daily lives and social status.

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2 Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict in the First World War

In the 1918 newsreel footage shot for The Care of Our Wounded, uniformed men load patients aboard No. 15 Ambulance Train (AT) in France, with the camera observing the repetitive and monotonous work.1 The footage, filmed by Gaumont Pathé, was sent from the continent back to Britain to demonstrate in cinemas on the home front what superior medical care the troops were receiving in battle. In the film, medical staff stretcher wounded men onto the train with the rapidity of gunfire, and the carriage’s brilliant white interior gleams through khaki-​framed windows. Gradually the camera creeps inside a carriage and looks up at the ambulance train’s inhabitants. The invalids peacefully lie in their three-​tiered cots and peek over their blankets like children caught awake after bedtime. Their beds are neat and the walls are clean in an orderly, even comfortable, environment removed from the realms of conflict. Of course, not all media portrayed the vehicles or the staffs in the same ways. Onscreen depictions of ambulance trains (produced subject to government restrictions) differed from the personal testimonies of those who lived and worked inside the carriages. On the battlefield, the camera shot living troops whose bodies continued to roam cinema screens long after the soldiers died. Thus cinema audiences witnessed massive slaughter by

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From Steam to Screen mass production. Yet death itself was not featured in movie theatres. On the one hand, government-​censored films focused on cleanliness, medical advances and the high standards of modern caregiving provided on the railway. On the other, the diaries written by the ambulance train staffs reveal a bloodier picture. Emily Jean Hardstone, a nurse serving in France, described working on ‘a train full of men, shattered and suffering […] their bandages dragging in the dirt’; she called the vehicle a ‘train full of tragedies’.2 Public experiences recorded on celluloid and private ones committed to paper were distinct from one another, indicating that the state’s interventions in filmmaking undermined the legitimacy of the onscreen image. However, there are numerous similarities and points of connection between the iconographies of onscreen propaganda and personal testimonies that provoke a reconsideration of the legitimacy of state-​sanctioned narratives about the war. For common to all the extant ambulance train films and diaries are tropes of whiteness, repetition as automation, and a desire to distance both the self, and the viewer or reader, from the horror of war. Somewhat counter-​intuitively, then, my research reveals that by reading propaganda films about caregiving alongside first-​hand accounts by medical staff, the status of the propaganda shifts from the realm of fiction to documentary. This chapter compares the two media to argue that cinema both archived everyday experiences of the war, and contributed to narratives about Britain’s modernity through representing up-​to-​date railway and medical technology. Throughout the conflict, the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), Red Cross, and the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) staffed over forty British and Franco-​British trains that carried patients across an extensive European rail network.3 The vehicles played a vital role in transporting wounded troops between battlefields and hospitals. Under the cover of darkness, and the Red Cross, the trains provided relative shelter to the injured and sick, and romanticised depictions of the vehicles were prevalent in British media. Twelve surviving newsreel items, including The Wonderful Organisation of the RAMC (1916), Behind the Lines with Our French Ally (1917), and The Military Power of France (1917) represent technological advancements in wartime medicine.4 Fiction films such as Under the Red Cross (UK, 1914), John and the Ambulance (UK, 1914), Roses of Life (1915) and Red Cross 70

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Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict Pluck (1915) all, as their titles suggest, portrayed the work carried out by nurses and medical officers.5 Furthermore, the vehicles featured in numerous articles in the daily press, which covered subjects ranging from technical appraisals to descriptions about the work carried out on board.6 Both films and personal testimonies about the ambulance trains offer evidence of ordinary people’s changing social interactions, which were brought about by a conflict predicated on mechanisation. But whereas the middle-​class viewers of the train effect films discussed in Chapter One sought to maintain class hierarchies in the face of what they perceived as modernity’s democratisation of British culture, in the First World War, notional egalitarianism was celebrated by a government keen to emphasise a united national identity. For example, the ambulance train’s inhabitants appeared on film and in personal testimonies as a homogeneous group, with military or Red Cross uniforms concealing class differences.7 The vehicles were depicted as inclusive spaces, which not only supported the rhetoric that the nation was united by international conflict, but also exhibited society’s increasingly democratised structure. Philip M Taylor suggests that the introduction of mass conscription for the first time in 1916, along with the government’s ideological justification of the war as a fight for democracy, made an increase in the electorate inevitable at the end of the conflict.8 The ambulance train films, therefore, prefigured the extension of suffrage legislated in 1918, when 14million British citizens were enfranchised.9 The First World War inadvertently reconfigured British society as ostensibly more egalitarian, even while the concept of nationalism was redefining the state as more exclusive.10 Responding to discourses about national and British identity prevalent during the war, the chapter examines whiteness as a motif in ambulance train films that simultaneously reinforced and undermined the nation’s social hierarchy, which occurred in two distinct ways. First, the prevalence of whiteness alluded to the privilege of racial identity during a period of crisis within the empire. Second, although not unrelated, whiteness implied both cleanliness and uniformity, with the metaphor reassuring audiences that wartime caregiving was carried out in sanitary conditions. In the three decades preceding the war’s outbreak, white objects (including uniforms and bed linen), and white spaces (such 71

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From Steam to Screen as laboratories), had became commonplace in the wake of germ theory.11 Institutions redesigned hospital facilities so that ‘the virtues of hygiene and order’ were emphasised to patients and visitors.12 Yet as Richard Dyer argues, ‘[t]‌o be white’ in terms of ethnicity is ‘to have expunged all dirt […] To look white is to look clean.13 Against the celluloid’s sepia hues, nurses’ uniforms, carriage interiors and patients’ blankets are all brilliant in their whiteness, and in personal testimonies, walls, chalk, sheets and crockery are described as white. The topos therefore served two purposes: it configured white people in an inclusive ‘British’ culture, and simultaneously positioned subaltern subjects as ‘other’.14 The colour (or rather, absence of it) created an aesthetic of modernity that privileged white people and excluded people of colour.15 As a result, I propose that the white interiors of First World War ambulance trains not only reflected contemporary medical architectures, but also Britain’s imperialism. In addition to the racial implications of the white spaces, British media presented the vehicles as up-​to-​date, clinical environments. Filmmakers’ and letter-​writers’ portrayals of the caregiving trains not only accentuated the vehicles’ (and so the nation’s) modern credentials, but also assuaged the public’s fears about the horror of war.16 Filmic and personal accounts of the war aligned both state and personal interpretations of the conflict, and as such were inclusive. However, the whitewashing carried out by first-​ hand witnesses across the two media also served to exclude civilians on the home front from understanding the actual nature of the war –​and so the vehicles again promoted exclusivity. To explore the various anxieties about identity that emerged both from representations and lived experiences of ambulance trains, the chapter first examines the history of the vehicles on the western front.17 I use personal testimonies and popular historical accounts to interrogate what life was like inside the carriages for the nomadic workers. Next, I problematise moving images and photography in the First World War, and investigate film’s ontological status in contemporary wartime culture, to establish how both the government and the masses conceived propaganda. Then, the chapter analyses the recurring motifs in films and personal testimonies that referenced the caregiving vehicles. I discuss the extant footage of the ambulance trains, and argue that, while the movies on first inspection support 72

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Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict the state’s rhetoric about the war, the films are actually congruent with the staffs’ personal testimonies. Consequently, I argue that both onscreen and written portrayals of the trains reveal the complexities of national identity in wartime Britain, as well as tensions between the nation’s perceived modernity and empire.

The Ambulance Train Just as the railways promised ‘the annihilation of space and time’ in the nineteenth century, so the railways transported munitions, supplies, mail and men towards annihilation on an industrial scale in 1914.18 The railway, once a symbol of human triumph over nature, came to epitomise modernity’s failings. Machine turned on man to deliver soldiers, munitions and guns to battlefields. John Westwood argues that ‘[t]‌he inescapable dependence of the continental powers on a rapid rail-​borne mobilization and concentration has led more than one commentator to describe August 1914 as “war by timetable”’.19 Yet the railway’s role in transforming the care received by wounded soldiers on both sides of the trenches has been largely overlooked in scholarship. The ambulance train first appeared in the Crimean War in 1855, when carriages transported British troops from the front line to hospitals.20 Lacking provisions and official transport, the army used trains to move injured soldiers from Balaklava to Sebastopol.21 However, the railway carriages were not constructed especially for the wounded’s conveyance, so the army improvised with straw mattresses in wooden freight carriages.22 Following the vehicle’s successful implementation in the Crimea, purpose-​ built ambulance trains were used in other conflicts throughout the nineteenth century.23 The necessity of an officially organised ambulance system was established in 1864 at the Geneva Convention, which insisted on the legal obligations faced by participants in conflicts to provide a humanitarian response to war victims, regardless of race or nationality.24 By the end of the nineteenth century the English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and United States armies all had dedicated ambulance services.25 Britain first used designated ‘hospital trains’ in South Africa in 1899.26 However, both French and German armies’ ambulance designs on the 73

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From Steam to Screen railways surpassed those of the British.27 A press report in 1898 stated that ‘[t]‌he French and German [armies], especially the latter, have the most elaborate regulations for railway ambulances in war, and have especially constructed rolling stock always ready for the permanent hospital trains’.28 Both armies extensively used the conveyance throughout the Franco-​ Prussian war, with French and German vehicles introducing through-​ corridors between the carriages that enabled communication along the entire train.29 In comparison to Britain’s European counterparts, the British trains were found wanting, with the British Medical Journal ‘doubtful if our railways possess sufficient rolling stock of that kind to improvise proper hospital trains’.30 The British ambulance train in South Africa was decorated in an elaborate fashion, but the officers’ domestic arrangements were catered for at the expense of patients.31 Everyday at five o’clock ‘Queen Victoria’s afternoon tea’ (‘a huge tea-​urn, some dozen bowls, and two large loaves’) was served to the workers on board the train.32 The vehicle’s design as a medical unit was incidental to the comfort of the medical officers on board. In 1914, with only one ambulance train in Britain, the country was ill prepared for the scale of care that the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) needed in the ensuing conflict. Government records show that ambulance trains did figure in contingency plans for the nation’s initial response to the outbreak of war in Europe.33 However, historian Edwin A Pratt contends that ‘the enormous magnitude of our operations overseas was not foreseen’ because state authorities assumed railway conveyances would be used only to transport the wounded between the country’s ports and London hospitals.34 As a result, there were no British ambulance trains sent to France with the BEF in August 1914. The oversight put both British and French military forces under enormous strain; suitable vehicles were hard to acquire as most French rolling stock was sent south to avoid capture by the invading German army.35 Furthermore, the French rail network was running at full capacity, so even when carriages were obtained there was no certainty of their use.36 In his memoirs, Theodore Fox, a Friends Ambulance Unit volunteer serving with No. 16 AT, recalled that ‘[t]‌he first trains in the BEF had been haphazard collections of French railway trucks and coaches, 74

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Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict hurriedly put together in 1914.’37 On August 17, the French provided the BEF with one hundred freight wagons and ‘a few’ passenger coaches; while the need for ambulance conveyances was desperate, the vehicles were in short supply.38 A retrospective report described how the French ‘allowed the English to beg, borrow and steal coal carriages wherever they could find them, at a time when the French themselves were very hard up for like accommodation’.39 The casualty lists now provide evidence of the crisis faced by British medical organisations, for in the first eight months of the war, the borrowed ambulance trains evacuated 67,000 wounded troops to French ports.40 When the British finally began building their own ambulance trains there were no standard designs to work from.41 The government instead relied on the state-​requisitioned private railway companies to transform existing rolling stock into medical facilities, with companies including Great Central, London and South Western, and London and North Western building twelve vehicles for use in Britain (see Figure 2.1).42 Many of the coaches were used despite their unsuitability for the task. For example, the ‘Knights of Malta and the Grand Priory of Bohemia’ train only accommodated one hundred patients.43 John F Plumridge suggests that, like the South African hospital train, the vehicle was designed to serve the staff rather than the patients, with the train’s inventory listing items including ‘glasses for champagne, port, claret, sherry, wine and liqueurs, as well as wine decanters and beer tumblers, spoons and nut crackers’.44 Pratt described another early ambulance train that similarly provided luxurious accommodation for the serving officers. The vehicle had ‘a bedroom, a sitting-​room, a lavatory and a bathroom for the medical officer or officers; a bedroom, a sitting-​room and a lavatory for the nurses; a linen-​cupboard, and a stove chamber.’45 Furthermore, each of the sitting rooms were fitted ‘with a leaf or fold-​up table and four chairs, and each was to have, also, two racks and hat and coat hooks’.46 Contemporary articles about ambulance trains indicated that rivalries existed between the private companies manufacturing the vehicles.47 Each week, the Railway News printed an article, alongside diagrams and photographs, describing the companies’ various interior designs. For example, the London and South Western Railway included mahogany compartments 75

newgenrtpdf

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Figure 2.1  Architects’ drawing of passenger rolling stock being converted to an ambulance train. Detail from Railway

News, ‘War Department Ambulance Trains as Arranged from the Existing L&SWR’s Stock,’ August 30, 1914.

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Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict ‘with white enamel panels,’ ‘upholstery of dark maroon leather,’ and a floor ‘covered with Corticene’.48 North Eastern trains boasted lavatories with ‘obscure-​glass’ windows and ‘balanced blinds of Rexine in a dark green shade,’ and featured kitchen floors made from lead.49 Meanwhile, the London and North Western ambulances produced coaches ‘finished in enamelled white’.50 The interior finishes achieved by the railway companies enabled the organisations to publicise their contributions to the war effort while also alluding to the standards passengers might expect on ordinary, domestic trains. Nevertheless, the privately built vehicles proved impractical in a wartime context. By the end of 1914, W J Fieldhouse (who was responsible for designing the British ambulance vehicles used in South Africa), created a standardised blueprint for all new medical trains that was sent to the Birmingham Railway Carriage and Wagon Company for construction.51 However, his plans proved unsatisfactory, as there was still no provision made for through-​corridors.52 Thus it was not until 1915 that the British ambulance trains exported to France were built to suit the needs of the staff and patients, with Fieldhouse’s train the last one built from pre-​existing rolling stock.53 H Massac Buist, a contemporary medical professional, claimed that bespoke vehicles were ‘undoubtedly better’ at serving the military’s requirements; the new coaches were therefore an improvement on the earlier models.54 Subsequently, those serving on board divided the British ambulance trains into two groups. The first were, according to an officer’s diary, ‘[t]‌he green trains,’ which referred to the vehicles compiled from French carriages.55 The green trains were numbered one to eleven.56 The second group, numbered twelve to forty two, were ‘streamlined, painted a flat khaki colour, against which the white of the Red Cross shows conspicuously’.57 The ‘khaki’ trains were the new vehicles, and, in Matron McCarthy’s words, ‘[a]ll coaches communicated’ and were ‘most beautifully fitted up’.58 The staffs on these trains were no longer the priority when designing accommodation. Many ambulance train workers did not join the Red Cross, FAU or RAMC until 1915 or later, because the War Office was at first reluctant to accept the FAU’s help or to send untrained volunteer nurses to the continent.59 When the government recognised the numbers of casualties the ambulance services were encountering, many more civilians were 77

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From Steam to Screen allowed to join medical organisations. Leonard Horner, one such FAU volunteer, described No. 15 AT in a letter to his cousin. The train was typical of the standardised design sent to France from 1915, in that it was ‘about 230 yards long’ and had ‘fifteen coaches, half of which are lying down wards and the other half sitting up wards,’ that looked ‘pretty much like an ordinary corridor train’. The orderlies ‘ha[d]‌the last coach on the train. There [were] four bunks in each compartment: two up, two down’.60 The ambulance train wards were similar in design to those found in contemporary hospitals. In permanent caregiving institutions, wards were laid out along corridors that enabled nurses to inspect the patients with ease, while adding ‘a strong element of regimentation along with sanitary order.’61 Railway carriages, which often featured through-​corridors, were structures well suited for adaptation into hospital environments. However, the ambulance trains were not equipped with the same amenities as ordinary caregiving establishments. For example, London hospitals were equipped with laboratories, schools, museums and spacious wards.62 Even the larger military hospitals in France ‘lack[ed] nothing that wealth c[ould] provide’ and offered ‘all sorts of luxury in the way of up-​to-​date treatments.’63 Yet, while funding and space persistently restricted facilities inside the mobile trains, the staff now lived and worked in railway spaces more consistent with the needs of the wounded soldiers being transported. Gone were the champagne and nutcrackers. Instead, workers lived four to a first-​ class compartment. The nursing sisters, who occupied separate quarters from their male colleagues, were also offered restricted personal space. The limited workers’ accommodation was described in the FAU souvenir book for No. 16 AT. ‘You find yourself in the staff coach (G),’ the guide reads, ‘with three small compartments in which three nursing sisters lead a somewhat confined life; three bunks for the medical officers and an officers’ mess’.64 The accommodation carriage was, nevertheless, heated, ‘whereas the rest of the train [was] not warmed, except when loaded, and then only if the engine manage[d]‌ it.’65 Patients were provided with more spacious ward coaches as a result of the medical workers’ lesser prioritisation. On the khaki trains, there were offices, dispensaries, dressing stations, operating theatres and isolation 78

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Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict wards, all of which served wounded soldiers’ requirements. Pantries were fitted in old lavatories. On No. 16, the coaches’ interiors were painted in white enamel and had electric light throughout.66 Fox described how the carriages (‘[y]‌ou may see the same coaches at Paddington,’ he assured his readers) were mainly used for ‘sitting-​up’ cases, or the walking wounded.67 Other coaches were fitted to take ‘lying-​down or more serious cases and featured double-​width doors to admit patients on stretchers.68 Inside the lying-​down wards, Fox wrote, ‘little or nothing of the original interior remained; and along the walls there were three tiers of collapsible iron beds’.69 The cots were installed using the Brechot-​Deprez-​ Ameline system, which was an iron framework mounted on springs and attached to the carriage wall to minimise the jolting motion of the train for seriously injured men.70 A Train Errant suggests the system provided ‘comfortable spring beds’ for the patients as they journeyed from the battlefield, via the casualty clearing station (CCS) to either a hospital or a hospital ship.71 However, despite the government and railway constructors’ efforts, Britain’s ambulance trains were not sufficiently equipped to cope with the scale of the wartime emergency. Even after the introduction of a new ambulance train fleet, overcrowding proved a persistent problem. Nurse Morgan wrote that on one day alone she witnessed an improvised (‘green’) train unload nearly 1,000 patients, with another arriving shortly afterwards to exchange six hundred more.72 Her own train, No. 6, carried four hundred, ‘the majority of whom were on stretchers.’73 A  reporter noted that inside the vehicles, ‘stretchers were placed three deep –​that is, one above the other –​and this seemed to preclude any really adequate attention being paid to any of the three.’74 In hospitals, ‘[i]‌t [was] not desirable to have more than one hundred patients and staff per acre,’ with wards a minimum width of twenty-​one feet, and each bed occupying six feet of wall space.75 Of course, as the war progressed, purpose-​built medical facilities were also subject to overcrowding. Nurse Margaret Brander, who initially worked in a base hospital before transferring to an ambulance train, described how ‘corridors were filled with stretchers, the chairs (from the gamblers’ tables) full of wounded [and the patients] were tumbled into the places as soon as they were left vacant.’76 Nevertheless, hospitals generally were more 79

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From Steam to Screen spacious and better lit than ambulance trains, as the ward coaches had no windows and were cramped.77 One solution to combat lack of space was offered by No. 17 AT’s souvenir book, which reported that ‘the racks in the compartments were removed and stretchers fitted up instead to increase the accommodation.’78 However, the overhead cots were used only in exceptional circumstances. This was because the makeshift beds made for ‘a crude and unpleasant’ experience for the injured party.79 There were no double doors to the sitting-​down compartments so stretchers had to be ‘broken’ to gain admittance: the device was collapsed and lifted to shoulder height with the patient still recumbent, and the wounded man was expected to manoeuvre himself into the narrow bunk.80 The trains, which in 1915 cost £17,500 to construct, were still not without fault, and even on the khaki trains life was not easy for the workers or patients.81 The volume of soldiers that required assistance continually overwhelmed the medical services. Official figures state that in the first five months up to January 1915, the BEF dealt with 177,423 casualties.82 Provisions were scarce. Drugs, bedding, food and space were valuable commodities. On board No. 26 AT, the carriages were often lit with lamps and candles because the gas ran out on long journeys.83 Horner claims that, without heating, the cold was ‘frightening,’ and that in extreme conditions ‘[b]‌read [was] like stone and if you touch metal work with the naked fingers it freezes to them immediately’.84 Meanwhile, Brander bemoaned the time-​consuming practice of loading the train.85 First, each soldier’s temperature was taken. Second, a paper slip (similar to those seen in the film New Zealand Ambulance) was filled out. This recorded the soldier’s name, his injury, temperature, diet and suggested treatment. The slips were then pinned to the patients’ pillows. Finally, the nurses ‘started dressing those that had not been done at the CCS and any that were soaked through. If time permitted and we had water to spare we washed faces and hands and that was the thing they were all so grateful for’.86 Days might elapse before men were transported from the CCS to the ambulance train, or before the first dressing was applied to the men’s wounds.87 Food rations were both basic and scarce, consisting of bread and tea.88 Fox carried the tea in ‘thoroughly polished nickel-​plate 80

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Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict pails’ down ‘150 yards of confoundedly obstructed corridor’ to reach the sitting cases, where ‘[t]‌he rations [were] then doled out, in the hope that they will go round’.89 Bread was mouldy. Water ran out on journeys that took many days instead of the few hours expected. Lavatories were overflowing and had to be emptied by hand.90 On particularly busy trips, the staff had to give up their bunks to the wounded, with officers and volunteers alike sleeping in corridors regardless of class or station. Many of the personal testimonies that survive the ambulance trains refer to the grim sights observed by the medical staff when treating the injured. For example, Horner wrote to his cousin: ‘I have seen sights today that I shall never forget’.91 Geoffrey Winthrop Young, an FAU pioneer, was struck by ‘the stench of old wounds, among always fresh hundreds of shattered remnants of human beings’ on his arrival in France.92 According to Fox’s account, actual medical treatment on board the ambulance trains was slight: men were given painkillers (aspirin or laudanum), where such drugs were available, and had their wounds dressed.93 Operating theatres were available on some vehicles but were used only in emergencies (for example, if a patient was likely to die before reaching a hospital).94 The train had to stop in order for surgical procedures to be carried out, and so endangered the lives of the other passengers.95 Patients made long journeys by railway with shrapnel, maggots and dirt in wounds that were already infected. Brander, a professionally trained nurse, found the injuries she saw ‘disgusting’.96 Her records are more explicit in discussing the patients’ care than those written by volunteers. Two men particularly appalled her, and her medical terminology does not diminish the grotesque suffering she witnessed. One had ‘[h]‌is nose broken, his humorous compound fracture, femur fracture compound, penis shattered’ she reported, while another had ‘both eyes shot out and part of [his] brain bulging from [his] forehead’.97 Morgan also wrote about the injuries that the soldiers sustained, and on July 1, 1916, she witnessed the casualties of the Somme offensive.98 There were four ambulance trains waiting to load behind her own, No. 6 AT, while two further improvised trains were available with the capacity to transport one thousand sitting patients each.99 Morgan heard ‘the news is good but the casualties terrible. Last night or this morning 100,000 casualties and deaths were expected’.100 The first day 81

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From Steam to Screen of the Battle of the Somme produced the single highest casualty figure in the war, and a handwritten logbook for No. 16 AT recorded the day’s journey, taking in St. Pol, Doullens, Warlincourt and Le Havre, and carrying a total of six hundred and ninety-​one patients.101 The number was underscored in heavy pencil lines three times.

Visual Culture in the First World War In the nineteenth century, photography presented governments, military forces and civilians with a new perspective on war, as images documented fighting in the Crimea, the American Civil War and South Africa. But the projected moving image, which in 1914 was not yet a decade old, offered viewers something newer still: film not only enabled spectators to see differently, but also to vicariously experience movement. Motion pictures, inventions of modernity that inscribed time and space on mechanically reproduced filmstrips, were distributed on a large scale, and thus essential in both shaping, and spreading, propaganda. The government’s use of film during the First World War meant that the conflict was fought through the flow of information to the public in addition to the more typical flow of bodies to the trenches. The machines that fuelled the nineteenth-​century industrial revolution, including trains, telegraphs, electricity, and automatic rifles, made possible battle on an unprecedented scale and markedly changed the geographies of war. Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes how, with the train’s invention, ‘[m]‌otion was no longer dependent on the conditions of natural space, but on a mechanical power that created a new spatiality’, that is, space simultaneously collapsed and expanded with technological efficiency.102 Military forces’ supplies and communications were delivered across vast areas, and hand-​to-​hand combat was made redundant by the robotic ability to load a rifle and pull the trigger from inside trenches. Nations manufactured guns, shells, tanks and aircraft for the mechanical annihilation of men, and the cold metallic objects of war initiated a stark objectivity to the slaughter that ensued. Friedrich Kittler contends that beyond propaganda, cameras and automatic weapons have a shared history. He asserts that ‘[i]‌n the principle 82

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Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict of cinema resides mechanized death as it were invented in the nineteenth century:  the death no longer of one’s immediate opponent but of serial nonhumans.’103 Pictures and bullets were both projected in the same ways; both machines were designed to shoot and capture, with filmic language referencing violent acts typically associated with guns. And the ‘transport of pictures’ mimicked not only the bullet, but also the train and the telegram, all of which technologies shot across landscapes to reach human targets.104 Illustrations and written reports could not match the camera for its impersonal, mechanised view of events, with aerial photographs and moving images prevalent in both print and cinematic media. Thus the impersonal violence enacted during the First World War was a nightmare dreamt by modernity and wrought by its machines. There is a certain prescience to the half-​page advertisements printed ten days before the war’s outbreak in the Illustrated London News. The three commercials all documented fixations with metal, machination, and ways of seeing in products designed to enhance the human body. The advertisements offered:  Paris Garters, which made the wearer ‘feel safe’ because ‘[n]‌o [m]etal can touch you’; Aitchison Prism Binoculars that provided users with ‘clearer definition and greater illumination’; and finally, ‘Smith’s World-​Famous Chronographs’.105 The three items on sale were produced using the consumable materials that would eventually consume Europe’s populations. The binoculars’ description is particularly fascinating, for along with the product’s improved definition and ‘illumination’, they had ‘high optical properties’ and were used by the army. The binoculars, a visual technology that improved human sight, revealed what might otherwise be concealed, just as x-​rays exposed interiors and microscopes magnified unseen realities. The Aitchison binoculars, one assumes, did not have the ability to ‘illuminate’ their subjects. But their power of ‘illumination’ alluded to the magic power, or aesthetic of the inexplicable, accorded other, contemporary optical instruments. For example, British publications were keen to convince their consumers that the camera was an unfaltering truth teller. The Illustrated London News was especially, if not surprisingly, invested in this campaign, with the periodical frequently featuring articles that dehumanised photojournalism. ‘The Camera as War Correspondent: Notes by 83

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From Steam to Screen Photography’ replaced illustration with mechanised images and the war correspondent with the camera.106 Photography was in effect given a byline, which was unusual at a time when editors anonymised printed articles. The journal also ran articles under the banners ‘Camera as Recorder’ and ‘The Camera in Three Continents’.107 The publication gave human agency to the camera and invested the machine with qualities superior to regular journalists (in doing so discrediting other, human reporters by proxy). The newspaper published photographs taken in trenches, after battles, and on trains, and presented readers with ‘The First Photograph of a Diver at the Bottom of the Sea’ alongside other obscure perspectives on the world.108 One such story featured homing pigeons used to collect aerial photographs.109 The birds were strategically vital to the military’s operations because when in flight, the creatures offered a view that could not be easily achieved, even by aeroplanes. The pigeons’ speed (1,836 yards per minute) and technological specifications (‘[t]‌hey must always have a clear sight’) were reported as if the birds were machines.110 According to discourses in the popular press, the natural could not compete with the technological when one needed to see with accuracy. Moving images, therefore, were represented by British media as purveyors of truth that offered accurate, mechanical representations of an altered reality to ensure film’s effectiveness as propaganda. However, alterations, such as those made by editors splicing reels together to make edited news items, were overlooked by film production companies seeking to sell their wares. For example, Kineto, a London-​based film distributor, took out full-​page advertisements in the Bioscope to promote their short documentaries.111 The company suggested there was ‘large demand’ for films that were ‘[s]‌hort and to the point’ and that featured ‘[e]xcellent photography’.112 Pathé Frères also proclaimed the newsreel’s brilliance in a promotion dramatically entitled ‘Zeppelin Raid’.113 The advertisement referred to an air raid that took place on Britain’s east coast. ‘On Wednesday night,’ the company proclaimed, ‘less than 24 hours after the event, the photographs were shown in all daily editions of Pathé’s Animated Gazette.’114 The newsreel, like the camera-​laden pigeon, was as reliable as any other news source: like the newspaper, film, too, could reach the public in 84

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Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict less than a day. Kittler, in his exploration of print and film, contends that ‘[l]‌iterature dies not in the no-​man’s land between the trenches but in that of technological reproducibility’.115 Print media were therefore challenged during the war by cinema’s increasingly significant immediacy, and companies such as Gaumont illustrated the camera’s benefits to audiences in advertising campaigns, like the one entitled ‘Contrasts’.116 The promotion features a projector on the left and a German Zeppelin on the right. The former is ‘[a]bsolutely reliable’ while the latter is ‘[a]bsolutely unreliable’. According to filmmakers, at least, film (or perhaps more accurately, British film) did not lie. Cameras, of course, tell untruths. Subjects are arranged and images manipulated to alter context and editing –​the process of splicing, cutting and reordering –​changes narrative. Yet mechanically reproduced images documenting the war were published as real evidence. This suited publishers’, distributors’, and the government’s agendas alike, for their assertions about film’s ontology were manipulations in another, information-​based war. But despite cinema’s propagandistic role, the documentary remained popular. Susan Sontag argues that ‘[b]‌y the 1920s the photographer had become a modern hero, like the aviator and the anthropologist.’117 Taking photographs and recording film at the front was romanticised; images were collected like new species, which, once caught, could not get away. Roland Barthes proposes that the camera’s subjects ‘do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies’.118 His words are reminiscent of T S Eliot’s allusion in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ to the ‘patient etherised upon a table’.119 Butterflies and bodies were duly caught in mechanical processes that deliberately confused the living with the dead. Aside from film’s questionable ontological status, there were considerable pressures exerted by the British government on those working with cameras at battle sites. The government did not initially believe cinema to be a useful medium for promoting propaganda because it considered motion pictures to be lowbrow entertainments for the masses.120 Luke McKernan contends that cinema was ‘alien to both the class and literary culture of those who controlled British propaganda.’121 Ministers were at first wary of the medium and were slow to realise film’s potential, with government policies controlling information at best confused, and at worst overly 85

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From Steam to Screen draconian and even totalitarian. Cate Haste argues that ‘so little information [about the conflict in Europe] was released that the home front was left in a state of bewilderment about the nature of the war’.122 Official war news was blockaded so thoroughly from newspapers and movie theatres that, in 1914, both media organisations and civilians alike were largely ignorant as to what happened on the continent.123 Thus the British government’s propaganda strategy during the First World War did not initially include film. Cameramen and print journalists alike struggled to access the western front in 1914; upon arrival most were returned home. Military and parliamentary authorities concealed the conflict’s scale from the British public, and strict censorship was at odds with the revelatory nature of cinema, which necessarily made visible the conditions facing the BEF in France. However, the Ministry of Information (MoI, the government department set up to regulate wartime news) increasingly recognised the moving image’s value not only in reaching large audiences, but also in persuading people to support the war effort. Hence reporters successfully gained admission to the front lines again in 1915, when critics began acknowledging film as an increasingly ‘sensible’ mode of communication that should be exploited.124 However, British officials, who imposed strict guidelines on the materials shared in the public domain, still viewed the camera’s presence with caution.125 The government subsequently appointed Topical Films (a conglomerate of production companies overseen by the British Topical Committee for War Films) to take responsibility for all war-​related news films and ensure that newsreels complied with state regulations.126 And, in December 1915, The Times announced that the first motion pictures from the front line in France had passed the ‘final’ stage of censorship at the War Office  –​suggesting that the films had to navigate multiple restrictions before being exhibited.127 The King then viewed the same selection of Topical Committee films privately before distributors released the images to the public.128 As a result, an unlikely picture emerged on the British home front that showed order where there was chaos, and sturdy trenches where there were swamps. Footage and images released to the public often showed the BEF carrying out training exercises, maintenance work or routine daily tasks. Still and 86

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Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict moving images alike protected those at home from the real horrors taking place in Europe’s trenches and towns. Thus media assertions about photography and film’s ontological connection to the real were designed to hide the actual situation at the front. In January 1916, battle footage was released in Britain for the first time and proved popular with viewers.129 Later in 1916, a poem entitled ‘The War Films’ was printed in The Times. In the poem, Henry Newbolt described the transcendental experience of watching wartime moving images, noting ‘[h]‌ow in a gleam have these revealed /​The faith we had not found.’130 In particular, it is his assertion that the films inspired a newfound ‘faith’ in viewers that attests to film’s role in convincing the British public to back the war effort. So strong was the association between cinemagoing and support for the BEF that, by 1917, the MoI’s rhetoric demanded that viewers watched British war news ‘in order to save the country’.131 Popular pictures screened on the home front included a variety of scenarios that included battles, munitions factories and the activities of subaltern troops. Moreover, one recurrent motif in wartime film was caregiving, with the ambulance train an essential and prevalent feature in onscreen narratives about medicine that the government propagated to reassure civilians about conditions in the military. Caregiving facilities provided filmmakers with relevant wartime narratives that focused on salvation rather than abjection, and depicted advanced modern medicine rather than the barbarism of war. Alongside ambulance trains, news media also reported on other medical facilities, including Red Cross training; ambulance barges; casualty clearing stations; hospitals; and the Blue Cross service for injured animals.132 Despite the apparent popularity of caregiving in wartime news, it is difficult now to locate evidence about how medical-​ related stories were distributed or received during the conflict. Yet sources do suggest that films from the front garnered major press attention, owing to War Office press releases announcing new footage. In addition, distribution companies paid to advertise war films, with some, such as Gaumont, printing colour notices for British Army in France (the first pictures from the front screened in January 1916)  in the trade press.133 On yellow paper with red and black text, the boldly coloured advertisement was sandwiched between notices for popular fiction such as 87

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From Steam to Screen The Devil’s Bondman, signifying Gaumont’s confidence in selling wartime narratives.134 Indeed, critics attested to the popularity of war films not only in London, but also in rural areas and the Dominions.135 For example, the Bioscope described ‘[a]‌large audience at the West End Cinema on Tuesday morning,’ which ‘testified to the great interest shown in these pictures’.136 Another reporter stated that the British Army in France films were ‘having quite a good run in Scotland, and wherever they have been shown have been exceptionally well received.’137 To some extent, the War Office stamp of approval encouraged large audiences to attend by lending the films an air of authenticity, with one reporter claiming that the official nature of the images ‘ensure[d] that no “faking” of any kind [was] permitted.’138 Consequently, film production units, distributors, exhibitors and the daily press were complicit both in promoting carefully edited propaganda as ‘real’, and accepting government interventions in wartime filmmaking as necessary to the nation’s success. Film was also put to official use by the forces serving overseas, where the military encouraged cinemas as entertainment for the troops. Indisposed soldiers were especially likely to attend screenings. In 1915, Brander described a screening that took place at a hospital base station in France: ‘in came Major Unwin,’ she wrote, ‘to ask if we could lower the curtains for a cinematograph entertainment tonight. I hear it is to take place at six fifteen.’139 A front-​page article in the Illustrated London News similarly reported a movie experience for laid-​up soldiers who were able to watch images projected onto the ceiling above their beds.140 The headline was accompanied by an illustration showing the invalids watching a Chaplin-​ esque figure being projected overhead, suggesting that military authorities recognised cinema and, more specifically, comedy’s use in boosting morale. While the short article does not mention the film programme, a separate report in the Bioscope alluded to the genres of entertainment favoured by the men.141 Popular on the western front were ‘knockabout and chase comedies, scenes of comic destructions and light humorous plays generally. Four or five sensational melodramas were also taken, however, besides one scenic film and the topical picture, “Men of the Moment”’.142 Fiction was no doubt a welcome distraction from the realities of war:  the newsreels and documentaries shown in cinemas back home, including New Zealand 88

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Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict Ambulance and The Care of Our Wounded, showed audiences events that the soldiers already witnessed first hand. The film industry was lent further credence back in Britain by demonstrating support for the BEF, with both public and private generosity towards the British forces one of three popular themes in wartime newsreels. The second motif was collectivism and public spirit, and the third was the campaign’s organisation and efficiency. Together, the three topoi endorsed national unity and encouraged audiences not only to support the war, but also to participate together in fundraising and national service. For example, The Result of Cinema Day (1916) included all three themes.143 The newsreel item self-​referentially saluted the film industry for raising funds from a national ‘Cinema Day’, when, stated an intertitle: the proprietors of Picture Halls throughout the British Isles gave their entire takings to the fund […] to provide a complete Ambulance Convoy, including fifty Ambulances, four Officers’ Cars, Seven Despatch Motorcycles, three Luggage Wagons, and a traveling Repair Motor Shop, for the use of our Forces at the Front.144

Fiction film, too, was determined to validate inclusivity. For example, Mrs  John Bull Prepared (1918) showed the nation why women were so vital to the war effort.145 In the movie, a traditional old gentleman refuses to let women work in his factory when the male workers are conscripted. An ethereal female figure visits him in his garden and puts him to sleep, enabling the women to work and the war to be won. The old man awakes years later to find his home donated as a hospital and his daughters in uniforms. An intertitle, framed as a message from the Prime Minister, then tells viewers that ‘[a]‌share in the hardships means a share in the glory’. That government leaders approved of women workers meant that the public necessarily had to approve the female workforce, too, in a narrative that made congruent inclusivity and the rhetoric of victory. Newsreels remained an unofficial adjunct of British propaganda throughout most of the war. The Press Bureau, which supplied information to media outlets and was responsible for censorship, concentrated its efforts on targeting ‘elite’ (that is, politicians, journalists, academics, and so forth) 89

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From Steam to Screen overseas audiences, rather than those at home.146 It was not until 1917, when the Department for Information (which in 1918 was retitled the Ministry of Information) was established that home-​oriented propaganda became a priority.147 Taylor proposes that the change occurred due to the influence of newspaper proprietors Lords Beaverbrook and Northcliffe, both of whom recognised that propaganda was most efficient when media ‘directly targeted public opinion itself,’ and was not implemented using an ‘us’ and ‘them’ approach.148 The Ministry officially recognised that film was a vital medium in the government’s propaganda strategy as the emphasis shifted from exclusive to mass audiences. Thus cinema’s role in the First World War was a complex one. On the one hand, movies were used to conceal the true nature of the conflict by perpetuating narratives about British success and technological supremacy. On the other, the medium was deployed by the government as part of a concerted effort to make the nation’s propaganda campaign more accommodating of home front audiences.

The Ambulance Train on Screen Throughout the war, cinemagoing intersected not only with notions of public duty, but also charity. Caregiving films in general, and ambulance trains in particular, were linked to fundraising activities that persuaded audiences to attend screenings of war-​related pictures. Of course, with news scarce and information limited, caregiving films from the continent offered home front audiences greater proximity to the BEF and gave viewers in Britain the chance to recognise family and friends serving overseas on screen.149 But the British public also attended screenings of the caregiving and AT films as a patriotic obligation that supported British industries and war-​related charities.150 For example, a screening of what was probably The Care of Our Wounded took place at the West End Cinema in Coventry to raise money for the Nation’s Fund for Nurses, demonstrating how cinemagoing and charitable giving were bound together.151 The Manchester Guardian reported that at the event, the audience would have the opportunity to watch ‘the progress of the wounded man from the battlefield to his arrival in a home hospital,’ with the Red Cross ambulance train ‘admirably presented’.152 90

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Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict Alongside exhibitions of the ambulance trains at stations across Britain (new vehicles frequently toured the country to garner public interest and financial support), the films helped increase both the vehicles’ profile and public donations to the war effort. Even the men serving on the railways in France took an interest in the attention the vehicles received back in Britain. For example, Leonard Horner wrote to his cousin Robbie:  ‘The other day I saw No. 29 AT, or at least part of it which is now being “mobilised” over here. I see from the papers that two new GWR trains are on show in England.’153 Horner also received news in February that Robbie had been to view No. 29 while it was on display in Blackpool. Government strategists were so assured of the vehicles generating positive press coverage that the tours continued despite ambulance train shortages and growing casualty numbers in France. In eleven of the twelve extant ambulance train films (excluding the 1915 Berlin News Service Reports, which depicts the German Kaiser inspecting a train in a ceremonial context), there are three recurrent motifs:  first, the crews demonstrate their activities in orchestrated set pieces. Second, there is a fascination for the instruments and spaces that the medical staffs used. And third, whiteness pervades the otherwise sepia screen. The films show the medical system’s advantages in choreographed shots wherein each body functions like a cog in a machine. Indeed, seven of the twelve surviving films have the same sequence in common: stretcher-​bearing men in and out of carriages. For example, in The Wonderful Organisation of the RAMC, scores of men are unloaded from a railway ambulance onto a hospital ship: the bodies are anonymous and each new patient replaces the one that went before. Filmmakers had to find ways to avoid brutality on screen, attempting to bury out of sight the masses that were shot in more literal and damaging ways on battlefields. The newsreels’ cyclical sequences were always cut before the final load came into view: there was always another replacement waiting to take the former patient’s turn. As such, where at first there is one stretcher-​bearer, there are sure to be many hundreds more. A single motor ambulance pulls away to reveal another, and another and another. Where one man lays in his cot on the ground another ten lie beside him. For example, Hospital Offered by the 91

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From Steam to Screen Americans in France (1920) shows stretcher-​bearers loading patients into a carriage. There is a pause between one man being loaded and the next so that the operation’s lengthy nature becomes visually apparent. When three men are loaded, the film cuts to a wide exterior shot to reveal at least five more waiting to be taken on board. Military personnel, volunteers and injured troops all occupy the screen together and all participate in the same activities of loading and unloading. Nurses are also abundant in the films, their presence implying domesticity in sequences that portray the women calmly overseeing the men’s manual work. Gender is demarcated in the sequences by both uniform (the men wear khaki; the women wear white) and the roles performed (carrying men or supervising), so men and women are visibly segregated. However, the nurses’ onscreen presence both visually and spatially includes women in the machinated caregiving routine. The viewer cannot see precisely how many patients await transferral to or from the train in any of the ambulance train films. Hospital Offered by the Americans in France keeps a tight focus on the stretcher-​bearers’ repetitive actions (stepping up and down; walking back and forth), suggesting an automated activity with no beginning and no end. The camera in The Wonderful Organisation of the RAMC tells audiences more about the numbers involved when it cuts from a medium close-​up to a long shot, revealing hundreds of men working alongside the tracks. The patients’ bodies stretch into the distance; the scale is so great that the men become like a conveyor belt of goods. Thus newsreel items codified the spaces of medical transportation like modern factories, and reduced bodies to technological phenomena, or the products of industrialisation. Men who worked like wind-​up toys treated patients, while the wounded were loaded into mechanical trains. There was no chaos, no blood and no fear, and so the onscreen war was presented to audiences in Britain not only as ideologically necessary, but also as safe and advanced as possible for the conscripted troops. Alongside the men, the objects that made possible effective evacuation and treatment were foregrounded in the films, with items including stretchers and cot frames consistently represented on screen. Moving images do more than simply photograph the objects for posterity; the movies preserve how the things were actually used. It is likely that contemporary 92

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Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict audiences took an interest in how things worked, and that the camera’s focus on transporting patients had practical implications for British moviegoers, for the ambulance train films were instruction manuals for those who might one day serve in the forces.154 Audiences watching the newsreels in Britain were reassured of the high standard of treatment their loved ones received, and also learned in a practical sense how to perform that level of care. Viewers, therefore, vicariously participated in the same processes as the ambulance train crews, as the films’ spectators were instructed to carry stretchers at shoulder height when loading men into carriage doors that stood five feet from the ground. A shot set level with the ambulance train’s doors in The Care of Our Wounded demonstrated the correct way to unload patients by passing stretchers from floor level inside the coach to the men’s shoulders outside the vehicle. In addition, the film exhibited how to unclip stretchers from the wheelbarrow-​like conveyances that were used to move patients over short distances. The practice of transporting recumbent men was also displayed in Mr Justin Godard Inaugurates an American Hospital Train Offered to Our Wounded (1916), in which an eager crowd is gathered outside the train to watch first-​hand as a man is borne from the carriage by two medical workers. The Wonderful Organisation of the RAMC also showed stretcher-​bearers hard at work. In one sequence, a nurse oversees the operation to ferry patients in and out of the vehicle. The film then cuts to a long shot that reveals the same practice going on down the entire train’s length. Pillows and men are passed on board, and blankets are shaken and folded. In Pathé Old Negative Collection 15 (1915) the film provides detailed close-​ups of a medical officer fixing a cot frame inside a motor ambulance.155 Moreover, in New Zealand Ambulance, close-​up shots reveal how nurses attached cardboard identity tags to wounded soldiers before the journey from the casualty clearing station to the hospital. Thus ambulance train films educated audiences about vital aspects of the crews’ work, enabling viewers to participate in events at the front while seated in auditoriums. The films’ spectators also vicariously inhabited the spaces occupied by the ambulance staffs. In the movies about caregiving trains, cameras follow the vehicles’ workers on cinematic journeys that replicate those taken by wounded soldiers from battlefield dressing stations to hospital 93

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From Steam to Screen ships. As such, the interior spaces of the ambulance trains were mapped out in the newsreel items. The onscreen tours always began outside the vehicles. No film footage remains that depicts the trains at a station; in every case, the locomotive was stopped in the countryside where space was abundant for the large-​scale loading operation and supply exchange. That the sanitary conditions at rail stations were appalling, with human waste inches deep alongside the tracks, may also account for military officials and filmmakers stationing trains in rural areas.156 Once the outside location was established, the films moved towards the vehicles’ interiors and visited various rooms. For example, The First Italian Hospital Train  for the Front (1918) revealed both wards and dressing stations; in Hospital Offered by the Americans in France, a nurse’s office compartment  –​a standard first-​class compartment with a table  –​is visible through the window. In many films, the wide, double carriage doors are featured, signalling from the exterior the architectural changes wrought inside. Moving images redefined once familiar spaces with new practices, the camera instructing and guiding the cinema audience over new terrain. Within the ambulance trains’ interiors, the staff were depicted on screen performing the everyday tasks associated with caregiving –​for instance, loading patients, folding blankets and tending to the wounded. Personal testimonies reveal that the crews were formed of disparate social groups: of the ten accounts referred to in this chapter, one author is anonymous; four are women nurses; and five are conscientious objectors. The unnamed writer recounted that he dined in the officer’s mess, suggesting he was a member of the professional military personnel with a middle or upper-​ class background. Fox and Horner were English conscientious objectors; Brander was a trained nurse from Scotland. The No. 17 AT souvenir book, Lines of Communication, also alluded to the working-​class volunteers that worked on board the train. For example, an article entitled ‘Reflections of an Orderly’ was a fictitious monologue by a disgruntled man complaining about the cleaning he was tasked with carrying out.157 The dialect implied by the writing style (‘[w]‌ot the heye don’t see, the ‘eart don’t grieve over’) and the distinction between the writer and the bourgeoisie (‘[r]ich people do clean the soles of their boots, ask Mrs Jones’s dorter-​in-​lor, what’s in 94

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Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict service in Bayswater’) drew attention to the worker’s apparently inferior class.158 Yet while none of the films, or the numerous newspaper articles about the trains, explicitly referred to the various classes and genders that made up the staffs, the crews depicted on screen represented men and women, and a variety of classes. With regard to class, the camera did not privilege officers, but instead depicted the workers as a homologous group. The women’s presence on screen was because nurses were stationed permanently on ambulance trains from 1914, with between two and four nurses working on each vehicle. Conscientious objectors were involved through the FAU, the Quaker organisation set up to coordinate medical volunteers. The group’s founder, Geoffrey Winthrop-​Young, acknowledged the FAU had ‘hardly been mentioned in the Press’ and faced ‘cold-​shouldering and suspicion’ from government institutions.159 Despite such setbacks, the FAU staffed trains Nos. 16 and 17. We cannot see for certain the FAU volunteers in newsreels because the uniformed men are portrayed as cogs in the wartime machine alongside the officers and conscripts. However, that the FAU workers are represented as faces in the crowd indicates that the trains were promoted as egalitarian spaces where everyone lived and worked together. Yet, despite Britain’s reliance on colonial troops, there were no people of colour either working or being evacuated on the onscreen ambulance trains. Both the objects and spaces associated with the ambulance trains were noticeably white. Whiteness stands out from the brown sepia in every frame, with the juxtaposition in colouring serving three purposes. First, for practical sanitary reasons, many medical implements and uniforms were white. The ubiquity of whiteness in caregiving facilities followed Florence Nightingale’s assertions that white walls, whitewashing, and white fittings (for instance, curtains) were conducive to sanitary medical care.160 Second, the white markings in the Red Cross design made vehicles and people visible as non-​targets. Third, whiteness made people safe: just as whiteness protected ambulance trains, so it protected audiences from the wounds sustained in war. For the white people on the trains, and for those in movie theatres, it was also a cocoon that neutralised the confusing colours of the world outside the vehicle and attested to the imagined racial whiteness of the nation. 95

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From Steam to Screen White removed all traces of wartime blood and dirt, and, indeed, any acknowledgement of Britain’s declining imperial power. Consequently, through whiteness, British media were able to present the vehicles as up-​to-​date, clinical environments that served white, British troops. For example, the stretchers, so common a sight in the ambulance train films, were white. In The Military Power of France, the nursing sisters were dressed in crisp white linen. The First Italian Hospital Train for the French Front displayed pristine white sheets in the racks above the cots. White pillows and blankets appeared during The Wonderful Organisation of the RAMC. The white background to the Red Cross is visible on a waiting ambulance train as women sort through stretchers in US Signal Corps, Royal Engineers and QMAAC on the Western Front (1918). There are white bandages and white slings. Nurses hold their hair back with white caps. Through windows and open double doors we see the stark white interiors of the carriages. The Care of Our Wounded’s short interior sequence shows white metal cot frames, white walls and three invalids resting beneath white sheets. White, which also evokes peace and surrender in a wartime context, is ubiquitous on screen. Blood was absent in the filmic theatre of war; the pictures on and around ambulance trains were essentially rewriting history and effectively ‘whitewashing’ not only the suffering occurring within the carriages, but also to whom it occurred.

A Shared Vocabulary Newsreels exhibited the objects and spaces used everyday by the medical services. But the films do not show us where the staffs cooked, slept or socialised. Silently moving images do not grant us access to the thoughts of patients who needed medical attention on cold, dimly lit trains. The films also belied the severity of the patients’ suffering. The three men lying serenely in their cots in The Care of Our Wounded are at odds with the wounded soldiers described in the crews’ letters and diaries. Also the graphic descriptions of patients’ injuries penned by Hardstone, Morgan and Brander, among others, attest to brutalities that occurred in the conflict that were overlooked in onscreen reports. Brander goes so far as to describe one improvised ambulance train she visited as a ‘shame to the 96

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Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict British nation’.161 The ambulance train films were eager to promote the ideals of an inclusive national identity, yet extant personal accounts reveal the hierarchical nature of public media, which privileged the state’s discourses about democracy over narratives about the experiences of ordinary people. Hence, deficiencies in wartime care were not rendered in black and white on cinema screens. As such, whiteness served as a visible signifier of national identity that excluded the subaltern forces that Britain relied upon to fight, and win, the conflict. Troops from Kenya and India, among others, reinforced the British military, and subaltern subjects were depicted on screen in movies including From Trinidad to Serve the Empire (1916) and With Indian Troops at the Front Part One (1916).162 In the films, colonial forces are portrayed as willing participants in the war, with the troops’ patriotic support for Britain alluding to the empire’s inclusive tendencies. However, within the films, subaltern citizens are also depicted as subordinate to Britain, and are subject to an authoritarian gaze (for example, the Lord Mayor of London surveys the Trinidadian forces in From Trinidad to Serve the Empire). Moreover, in Our Empire’s Fight for Freedom Part Two (1918), colonial military recruits are filmed en masse, with the men’s individual identities obscured in aerial and long shots.163 Indian troops are filmed from above, which effaces their appearance, while Egyptian subjects are portrayed as a singular crowd. The colonial forces are represented in contrast to forces from Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, whose soldiers were shot in medium close-​up, which enabled audiences to identify individuals on screen.164 Furthermore, that no Indian, Trinidadian or other colonial troops appear in extant ambulance train films also contributes to distinctions between white and subaltern subjects –​especially given the vehicles’ status as neutral spaces ostensibly providing care to people of any race or nation. Movies about the vehicles thus supported the government’s rhetoric that the nation shared one common experience of the conflict, which was imperative in creating the illusion of social cohesion, though only in theory and not in practice. At first glance, then, moving images portraying life on the ambulance trains do not inform us about the everyday lives of the crews with anything like the honesty or detail apparent in personal testimonies. Yet the 97

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From Steam to Screen three tropes consistent throughout the extant newsreels –​routine, objects and the spaces’ whiteness –​permeate the private letters and diaries, too. In particular, accounts by nurses speak explicitly about the ambulance trains’ shortcomings. Nevertheless they, and other writers, also describe the experience as one that encompassed community and domesticity. Many of the writers refer to the repetitive nature of their work, with cleaning occupying both the staffs’ spare time and their writings. For example, Brander, after unloading all the train’s patients, would get ‘all beds brushed, cleaned and made up again’ and all the sweeping and dusting done.165 The next morning, her routine would start in earnest, as ‘all paintwork had to be washed inside and outside, windows cleaned and brasses polished’.166 Similarly, the crew on No. 17 AT reported that they ‘set in for a hard day’s work, making beds, scrubbing floors, cleaning woodwork, polishing brasses, until the place looks spotless once more.’167 On No. 16, the staff aired and counted blankets, swept floors and scrubbed windows, brasses and ‘the worst of the white paint’.168 If time permitted before the train was loaded with patients, domestic chores included polishing silverware and one last attempt to clean the white walls.169 The writers described their alterations to everyday objects in both diary entries and letters. The changes implemented by ambulance train staffs to their living quarters went some way towards making the vehicles more homely, with individuals varying the carriages’ standard designs to make the spaces more efficient. Alterations also enabled people to assume ownership of the accommodation by personalising the interiors. Morgan, for example, made ‘four pairs of curtains for our carriage window […] and they look[ed] rather nice’.170 In the same way that one would redecorate a new house to cement ownership, Morgan redecorated her train. She acknowledged, too, the changes wrought by her colleagues, who laid rugs and attached chocolate boxes to the walls next to the cots.171 Furthermore, the orderlies created ‘meat safes’ in the kitchens that used canvases and dripping water to keep provisions cool in hot weather.172 Horner also made changes to No. 5 when he transferred there in March 1917. He became secretary and had his own office compartment, which he redesigned to create more usable space. His renovations involved removing the upholstery, which gave ‘an extra 9” in width,’ and in January 1918, at ‘personal 98

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Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict instigation,’ shelves were fitted in place of the luggage racks, his desk covered in ‘American leather’ and dining-​car tables replaced the bunks.173 Horner neatly sketched out the alterations to his office in his letters home, with before and after diagrams included as proof of his ingenuity –​and no doubt more palatable to Horner’s relatives than stories about injury and illness.174 The crews’ attempts to make the mobile, often dangerous spaces more domesticated are reminiscent of the nineteenth-​century figure of the colonial adventurer or explorer taking homely items on their overseas trips. Moreover, the staffs were conscious of their trains’ white things. The workers scrubbed and brushed interiors, and washed the windows with chalk.175 Fox exaggerated that ‘[o]‌ur carriages were painted white throughout –​doors, corridors, walls, ceilings, and everything’. His preoccupations were endemic on No. 16. The train’s culture encouraged his belief that ‘if the white paint on the train was applied to a wall six feet high, this would reach for over a mile’.176 The souvenir book for No. 16 made the very same claim –​and commented upon ‘the dazzling beauty of the white paint’.177 The motif of whiteness permeated multiple media, colouring not only private accounts and film, but also articles about ambulance trains in the national press. In a report about the Princess Christian Hospital Train, a journalist wrote that ‘the whole of the interior [was] finished in enamelled white throughout’.178 The Midland Railway ambulance had ‘sides and roofs […] painted in glossy white enamel’.179 And the Canadian Northern Railway provided a train that ‘has been painted white, having been given three coats of a hard drying highest-​grade enamel’.180 A 1918 advert for Benger’s Food (a company that supplied the ambulance services) in the Illustrated London News promoted whiteness, with the image of a white-​ clad nurse standing before both an ambulance train and a truck whose exteriors, even, appeared white (see Figure 2.2).181 References to whiteness are consistent throughout personal testimonies, with both the whiteness of things and cleanliness obsessing the staffs. The workers wanted the trains to be seen and remembered as empty, polished and white. In A Train Errant, the reader was invited onto the train as an imaginary visitor. The writer asked that ‘[f]‌or the credit of the personnel it may be assumed that the train has been without a load for a day or two, and that it is looking at its best, its varnish sleek and glossy, and its 99

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From Steam to Screen

Figure 2.2  The pervasive whiteness of the war as displayed in advertising for

Benger’s Food. See Illustrated London News, ‘Benger’s Food,’ July 13, 1918.

long rows of brasses shining in the sun like gold’.182 The passage is particularly fascinating because of the assertion that the vehicle ‘has been without a load for a day or two’. Patients, the ambulance trains’ raison d’être, were an inconvenience that disrupted the workers’ attempts to establish domestic arrangements. Sanitary conditions on board were necessary for the injured 100

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Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict soldiers’ effective treatment; sanitary conditions were also maintained, the author implied, to remove all traces of the soldiers from the interior space. In particular, the walls’ cleanliness was a major concern: A Train Errant’s guide noted that, while the white paint was ‘beautiful’, it needed ‘much cleaning […] to keep it at its best!’183 Again, one supposes that the whiteness would have been better preserved without patients to dirty the walls. That the daily press and newsreels, which featured staged footage of smiling soldiers, should differ from private accounts about life on the ambulance trains comes as no surprise. The conflict between the public and private experience of war affirms our historical understanding of government censorship and propaganda. But both images and words often intersect in describing a world disrupted by violence, yet untouched by war. Whether we look at stretcher-​bearers going about their work in The Care of Our Wounded, or Fox’s account of his cleaning schedule, authors represent a frontline landscape that echoes the familiarity of home. Domesticity was a motif on both screen and page because the ambulance train was a home from home, a part of an imagined ideal of Britain that remained intact overseas. The theme served three purposes. First, the nomadic staffs relied on a traditional British identity to inure themselves from the changes taking place around them and their alien status on the continent. Second, the British government used the trope to gloss over the troops’ inadequate provisions, with ambulance train exhibitions and films presenting the vehicles as symbols of Britain’s modernity to the public. Both homeliness and advanced engineering were thus ‘made in Britain’ –​even as French, American and Canadian rolling stock was used to bolster British supplies. The whiteness that pervaded films and writings about the trains further established a homogenous national culture that looked the same at home and abroad and excluded any claims of subaltern troops to Britishness. And third, the mundane domesticity described in personal testimonies and performed for the camera was a reaction to the temporal and spatial uncertainties that upset the rhythms of everyday life. During the First World War, the nation witnessed the devastation that occurred when technologies, including trains, cinemas, and guns, mechanised killing. Hence films and testimonies described routines and created diagrams to create an 101

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From Steam to Screen orderly illusion where really there was chaos. Everything was laid out for inspection and approved like Sunday-​best clothes before church. Structural certainty, be it temporal (for example, a cleaning schedule) or spatial (the ambulance train interior’s white familiarity), was a survival mechanism that characterised wartime culture. Domesticity, therefore, was not only a private concern, but also a public one for a nation whose imperial status was in decline. In a world already disrupted by war, newsreels, newspapers and diaries alike inhabited a safe space that was untouched by conflict. The three topoi consistent throughout both public and private media –​routine, instruments and spaces, and whiteness  –​contributed to an aesthetic that reassured home front audiences by alluding to technological innovation and advanced caregiving strategies. Films and personal testimonies used devices such as repetition, whiteness and, in the written accounts’ cases, statistics, to describe a railway space akin to a factory in its spatial configuration and mechanisation. Loading and unloading men is reminiscent of mass production’s conveyor belt system. White interiors mimic the sanitary spaces of food packagers. And choreographed sequences imply the automated actions of factory machines. British cinema from the First World War era, and even the 1920s, tended to avoid anything other than ‘oblique’ references to modernity; indeed, Christine Gledhill asserts that the war undermined notions of progress, which was registered in films that were fantastical rather than scientifically rational.184 However, the ambulance train films explicitly recount the effects of modernisation and so are valuable to us now as archives of the transformations wrought by industrialisation. Thus both films and personal testimonies indicate how technology altered British culture in terms of aesthetics, scale and industrial practices. Additionally, the shared vocabulary of the two media was also connected to the nation’s changing social hierarchy and Britain’s position as an international political power. For example, the whiteness motif that appeared on screen and in written accounts implied that the soldiers inhabited a safe, sanitary environment, which served to placate a population suffering conscription. Yet simultaneously, the whitewashed narrative of caregiving separated those who did and did not comprehend the full scale of wartime destruction and so created a hierarchy whereby those on the front 102

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Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict line were more knowledgeable than those at home. And contrary to media representations of inclusivity, the ambulance train staffs, as well as the general public in Britain, were subject to divisions. Nurses (including Morgan, Brander and Hardstone) wrote in detail about the violence they witnessed. Meanwhile other serving ambulance workers were insistent on the trains’ cleanliness but did not write about trauma. For example, Horner chose not to put into words what he witnessed: he decided to suppress the horrors he saw until he had returned home.185 The discrepancies between the testimonies might be explained by the professional staffs’ training equipping them to cope with the situation better (the nursing diarists were experienced professionals, while FAU writers were volunteers). Moreover, the First World War contributed ‘shell shock’ to the medical dictionary and psychological wounds were commonplace among both the troops and the supporting medical workers, which perhaps accounts for the writers’ reluctance to address violent topics.186 The vocabulary shared by the films and testimonies, which conveys a particular national identity, is all the more intriguing when one considers that the ambulance train diarists and letter senders did so without any obvious motivation from the state. Writers were not dissimilar from filmmakers, with their words painting pictures about routine and whiteness just like those captured on film in the newsreels. Authors composed personal testimonies as practised tour operators who drew attention to the palatable spaces of caregiving, but distanced readers from the topographies of danger. Letters were censored and had an intended reader.187 Families and friends, and rigorous military censors, read all correspondence, which might account for writers maintaining a positive outlook on upsetting events to reassure relatives at home. However, keeping diaries was banned for all military (including medical) personnel. Fox’s diary extracts nevertheless describe a staff member who genuinely took pride in his railway home. It is therefore likely that spaces and objects distracted the staffs from their patients just as white interiors and stretchers on screen distracted viewers from the wounded. Penny Summerfield argues that all personal testimonies register, and hence uphold, the dominant culture prevalent at the time of writing.188 Owing to the War Office’s initial reluctance to allow volunteers to serve 103

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From Steam to Screen on the continent, it is possible that some personal accounts convey the propaganda the authors consumed in British media before joining the war effort. For instance, the writers’ focus on whiteness indicates the workers were reflecting, as well as contributing to, formations of national identity. And while many writers recorded their horror of war, the conflict was still justified in noble terms  –​Hardstone consoled herself with the idea that ‘the shedding of blood, the mutilation and the giving of life’ were sacrifices for ‘freedom and humanity’.189 Private discourses acknowledged the high human price paid for success, yet the workers still upheld the dominant, state-​determined rhetoric of inclusivity and domesticity in their writings. That the writers supported dominant cultural values in their accounts challenges the notion that the First World War represents a moment of rupture in British history. The testimonials’ depictions of mechanisation and modernity are congruent with state-​controlled media on the home front, despite the authors’ geographical remoteness from Britain. Thus vocabulary shared between public and private media challenges the notion that propaganda films only served to conceal, rather than reveal, the experiences of those serving on the front line.

Conclusion The ambulance train vehicles were prominent in visual media on the home front because the vehicles not only evoked the railway’s cultural significance in shaping Britain’s industries, but also exemplified neutrality and respite from destruction. Yet the mobile caregiving units were also sites of conflict; liminal spaces that represented anxieties about national identity and empire. Press reports designated the ambulance trains as singularly British when the mobile wards were international in their construction. The trains were homes but also places for work. And where the cinema represented the trains as safe, the privately written personal testimonies revealed that chaos and death were rife. Moreover, letters and diaries written by the ambulance trains’ staffs emphasised the roles of both women and conscientious objectors (two demographics often disregarded in populist narratives about the war) in caregiving. Neither group was consistently, if ever, represented in contemporary British media. Yet personal 104

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Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict testimonies similarly reinforced narratives about inclusivity, even though it was not granted to all: the ambulance train workers’ additions to the utilitarian trains enabled individuals to contribute as equals in determining how shared living quarters were used. That cameras did not enter into the transformed areas inside the carriages is at odds with cinema’s claims to inclusivity and none of the films that depicted ambulance trains ventured inside the personal living compartments of the staff members. While the movies’ preoccupations with public, rather than private, spaces rendered the trains as sites of communal living on screen, there were disparities within them. Films such as The Wonderful Organisation of the RAMC depicted all-​white staffs and patients but did not allude to disparities of race, class or gender. As such, the ambulance trains’ onscreen representation registered the contradictions between what Lee Grieveson describes as ‘democratic rule’ on the one hand, and ‘the realities of slavery and colonial expansion and exploitation’ on the other.190 While within Britain’s borders society was democratised along class and gender lines, the extant ambulance train films privileged a racial identity that excluded colonial subjects from participating in wartime narratives. Furthermore, the topos of whiteness was linked to anxieties about Britain’s declining status as an imperial power and the complex intersections of both national and international wartime interests. Throughout the conflict, British forces inhabited alien spaces that were owned by others. The BEF was fighting for British interests in a foreign land alongside nations including France, Belgium, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and the British soldiers were unlikely to speak all their allies’ languages. In addition, the French donated the first eleven ambulance trains used by the RAMC, which retained a label –​‘Franco-​British’ –​that marked their difference throughout the war. In 1916, the French government also requested that Britain take responsibility for the railways used by the BEF, which resulted in the nation supplying over two hundred miles of track to the continent.191 By the war’s end, the London and North Eastern Railway Company operated eight hundred miles of the foreign, French railway system.192 A year later, there were calls to link Britain more permanently with her European neighbours by creating a Channel Tunnel.193 Late in 1918, British companies began constructing 105

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From Steam to Screen ambulance vehicles for the American forces.194 Inside the trains, wounded German soldiers were treated alongside the French and British under the internationally neutral sign of the Red Cross. The movies also added to this socio-​cultural confusion as the French Gaumont production Hospital Offered by the Americans in France borrowed footage from the British newsreel Latest US Ambulance Train. In a war fought on foreign terrain and reliant on practical, as well as ideological, alliances with international governments, the notion of British industrial and military supremacy was challenged. Yet in the surviving ambulance train newsreels featuring British troops and wounded there are no workers or patients of colour. Whereas in America’s Answer to the Hun (1918) the camera shows two black chefs leaning out of the carriage windows and shaking hands – which affirms their American identity, and their position inside the caregiving space – there are no such references to people of colour inhabiting the same railway environments as white people in the British films. The British films’ pervasive whiteness likely helped establish a cohesive, if discriminatory, cultural identity that responded to Britain’s need for the multi-​ethnic, multicultural war effort, with whiteness asserting the nation’s dominance by unifying white British subjects in a racially erroneous narrative about wartime supremacy. The topoi of whiteness (which registered exclusivity) as well as interactions between workers of different classes and genders within the vehicles (which suggested inclusivity) were ubiquitous both in films and personal testimonies. Inside the caregiving vehicles, working-​ class conscripts, trained and volunteer female nurses, gentrified professional officers and religious conscientious objectors all worked, and lived, together. The nomadic staffs were a microcosm of white, British society. The disparate groups’ occupation of the same railway spaces normalised inter-​class and inter-​gender exchanges prior to the expansion of suffrage (to workingclass men, as well as women over age thirty) in 1918. For example, men and women inhabited the same onscreen sites, which alluded to women’s increasing presence in workplaces (a topic expanded upon in Chapter Three). Moving images, exhibitions, press reports and letters home were all used to create a discourse about equality in response to anxieties about the nation’s international status, and the caregiving vehicles, with their 106

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Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict allusions to safety and modernity, appeared on screen as early stars of cinematic propaganda. Consequently, the ambulance train films are useful to us now not only as historical records that archive the everyday experiences of the ordinary people who inhabited the spaces, but also as microcosms of the identity crisis that Britain faced on the home front.

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3 Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman

In 1929, the adventure film The Flying Scotsman, which featured sabotage, a runaway train, and a romantic subplot set on the London and North Eastern Railway’s eponymous London to Edinburgh service, was released in Britain amid great fanfare from the press.1 The actual Flying Scotsman locomotive had achieved international fame in 1924 after breaking the land speed record, and the movie was also an early example of a British ‘talkie’, in that it featured a short sequence of dialogue. But what is striking about the film now is its progressive representation of women. Joan, the heroine that saves the train from the murderous Crow, is a mobile and independent spectator, whose daring exploits are the main focus of the film’s action. She jumps aboard the moving train to follow Crow, spies on him, and follows him down the length of the vehicle while clinging to the outside handrail in an exciting sequence that shows her overcoming danger (see Figure 3.1). And, after averting a rail disaster, Joan comforts her shocked lover while he lies prostrate across the tracks. Thus she inverts patriarchal stereotypes of women as passive victims in need of men’s support, and instead embodies a new, ‘modern’ woman, who is enfranchised through suffrage and liberated from the domestic sphere.

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From Steam to Screen

Figure 3.1  Joan travels down the outside of the train as she attempts to thwart

the villain in The Flying Scotsman (British International Pictures, 1929).

Joan’s ability both to move through, and look at, the world without a man chaperoning her is demonstrative of broader transformations to white women’s lives in British culture. However, while the interwar period featured a number of popular films depicting women as passengers and spectators, The Flying Scotsman remains distinct in its attitude towards gender. For on screen, narrative convention dictated that women –​particularly those who ventured outside the home alone –​remained in perpetual danger from men and machines. The suffrage movement, which fought for women’s equality and had been successful in establishing policies aimed at regulating and improving women’s working conditions, resisted the notion that women could not participate in public life. Although women could not vote, they were eligible to serve on borough and county councils from 1907.2 The Trade Boards Act 1909 sought to enhance pay and prospects for women labourers in sweatshops, while women campaigned for the Shops Act 1911 that reduced working hours.3 And, as Chapter Two demonstrated, the First World War provided opportunities for women to participate in 110

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Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman work typically carried out by men, such as in munitions factories, and on the front line as nurses. After the conflict, the Representation of the People Act 1918 enfranchised women aged over twenty-​ eight, and the Sex Disqualification Removal Act 1919 gave women the right to work in all professions regardless of their gender.4 Consequently, women were not only consumers of goods who inhabited domestic arenas including the home and department store, but also manufacturers of consumables in the still male-​oriented public sphere. Nevertheless, despite major changes that expanded women’s roles in civic life, patriarchal culture continued to demean women’s labour and positions within male-​oriented, mechanised spaces. In particular, the railway and cinema, which were central to configurations of the nation’s modernity, became contested sites in which women’s presence was anathema, and screen and print media often featured narratives about girls and women who put themselves in danger by travelling or spectating alone. Hence films, newspapers and literature played upon tensions between women’s traditional and modern roles, and now reveal the precarious nature of women’s encounters with industrialisation. In particular, railway films from the interwar period (with the exception of The Flying Scotsman) depict women characters as casualties of a speeded-up world in which they get lost and injured unless they are saved or despatched by a man. In a corpus of seven extant films from the period, including The Wrecker (1929) and The Lady Vanishes (1938), six represent women as luggage or parcels that men send or receive, and all the women are subject to physical threats that emphasise their vulnerability in the public sphere.5 Moreover, in films such as Shooting Stars (1929) and Sabotage (1936), women working in the cinema industries face ruin or danger, with their proximity to entertainment and mass consumption putting them at risk.6 While some of the films feature working-​class protagonists, who are portrayed as legitimate members of the labour force, many are middle class and affluent. As a result, bourgeois women on screen who choose to work, or inhabit the public sphere, are most likely to come to harm. The narrative trend for middle-​class women to meet danger on the railway likely emerged from broader anxieties about both class (as explored in Chapter 111

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From Steam to Screen One) and gender hierarchies. Women not only participated in mass consumption, which relied on egalitarianism to ensure maximum economic input, but also negotiated circumscribed freedoms within a society that sought to maintain the status quo by restricting women’s access to consumer culture. Interwar railway films, then, highlight the intersections between moving and looking, labour and consumption, which materially shaped women’s encounters with industrialisation in Britain. Furthermore, in keeping with other iterations of modernity predicated on simultaneity, the movies demonstrate how women inhabited contested roles within British society that were both public and private, mobile and static, and liberated yet restricted. For example, women’s custom was essential to the normalisation of the nascent railway and cinemagoing industries, as women’s connections to the domestic, private sphere legitimised the activities as respectable pastimes. Writing about the United States, Amy Richter describes how railway services provided ‘public domesticity’ to encourage women to use the services.7 Shelley Stamp also investigates how crucial women audiences were to early cinema managers, who were keen to establish their venues as tasteful and suitable for bourgeois patrons.8 However, Stamp notes that there remained uneasiness in American culture about how women spectators were positioned within the capitalist framework of moviegoing.9 In the British context, news media both lamented women’s appearance in carriages and auditoriums by reporting sensational stories about women victims of train crashes and cinema fires, while also celebrating the phenomena of the ‘railway queen’ (a figurehead of railway-​based pageants) and women stars. Even in The Flying Scotsman, a reminder about the immoral influence of film tempers Joan’s gender nonconformity on the rail network, with the ‘Fallen Eves’ cinema booth at the fair drawing attention to women’s ambiguous status as participants in film culture. That interwar rail travel and cinemagoing in general, and women in particular, were represented by print and screen media as being dangerous or subject to danger, is contrary to both the safety records of the two industries and women’s relative security in carriages and movie theatres. By the 1920s, various railway bills and the Cinematograph Act 1909 had improved people’s welfare in train and cinema spaces. Although women 112

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Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman in any public environment were potentially at risk from men, they were actually less likely than men to be harmed through accidents on the railway, where the predominantly male workforce was in far greater danger. Reports that focused on women victims of train crashes and film fires, alongside screen fiction that emphasised women’s vulnerability as passengers and spectators, likely relied on sensational narratives and the pathos of the injured, helpless woman to appeal to readers and viewers. Moreover, I argue that disparities between the actual and representational experiences of mobile and active women point to fears about increasing gender equality and attempts by newspapers and film studios that were controlled by men to limit women’s movements. As Janet Thumim contends in her writing about women audiences in the Second World War, the contradictory nature of the patriarchal state’s relationship with women viewers was evident ‘in the space between the fictional woman on the cinema screen and the real historical subjects sitting in darkened auditoria up and down the country.’10 Similarly, I propose that examining the gap between actual and onscreen women in the interwar years provides new perspectives on middle-​class women’s experiences of modernity. In doing so, I consider women’s occupations of three sites: the carriage, the auditorium and the representative space on screen, which registers transformations to women’s mobility, vision and inhabitation of public space throughout the period. Crucial to my analysis is the proposition that moving images, as archives of spaces, offer us insights into women’s bodily experiences of mobility and the processes of containment that affected everyday life. Before turning to the movies, I first explore women’s changing status within the public and private spheres, from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1920s, to provide a contextual framework for the film corpus. I then present a brief overview of discourses about safety and danger on the railways and in cinemas, not only to demonstrate how government legislation attempted to minimise risk, but also to show how mobile women were continually portrayed as deserving victims in news media. Finally, I  examine the representations of women in railway films to explore how anxieties about gender and consumption in British society played out on screen. For no matter what safety devices rail companies or 113

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From Steam to Screen cinema managers deployed to keep their patrons safe, the onscreen women remained precarious.

The ‘Modern’ Woman To explain both the significance of, and patriarchal anxieties about, middle-​class women’s increased access to industrial space, it is helpful to outline the traditional demarcations between the public and private spheres, and  their relation to gender. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall contend that the two arenas, which emerged for the middle classes in the late eighteenth century, were accordingly associated with men and women –​men, in theory, operated in the public realm and participated in civil governance, while women occupied the private, familial space of the home.11 However, Davidoff and Hall critique straightforward readings of the binary division, arguing that the spheres overlapped and have to be understood in specific historical contexts.12 For example, as Jane Rendell suggests, women might engage in capitalist practices within the home, or carry out domestic activities in the public sphere.13 Indeed, the situation for women in the twentieth century was a complex one. Judy Giles maintains that, at least up to 1950, the private sphere was where women ‘sought to define themselves’, and that in the first half of the twentieth century, ‘discourses of femininity continued to organise themselves around concepts of privacy, motherhood, homemaking and “service”.’14 In the 1920s, when women entered the workforce in factories to produce mass consumable goods (such as electronics, which were often designed for the home), they simultaneously gained access to labour forces typically made up of men, and were subject to regulations imposed on them be male overseers. They had no control over their routine activities and their time was bought and sold through capitalist, patriarchal processes.15 Thus women’s status and movements through the world as autonomous agents were ambiguous. As well as gaining access to new areas of public life, women’s status also altered with regard to spectating and spectacle. Historically, women have been objectified under patriarchy, and scholarship on visual culture typically suggests that men observe, and women are observed. From Laura Mulvey to John Berger, and Judith Walkowitz to Liz Conor, academics 114

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Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman argue that, whether on screen, on canvas, or on the street, women’s bodies have been subject to a male-​oriented gaze.16 Yet when enfranchisement and improvements to labour laws enabled women to participate in the industrial sphere in greater numbers, their position became more complicated. For while women’s roles in the public realm made them more visible to men, their mobility simultaneously empowered them as spectators and enabled them to look at the world from new perspectives. This dichotomy, wherein women performed as spectators and spectacle, underpins what Liz Conor calls the emergence of the ‘spectacular modern woman’, who became conscious of her status as an object.17 Conor suggests that ‘this visually intensified scene provided new conditions for the feminine subject. To appear within it was literally to make a spectacle of oneself.’18 The modern woman, often represented in visual media by the bobbed-​haired ‘flapper’, had the freedom to appear in the street alone, but within limits delineated by men’s authority and gaze. By 1900, Woman’s Weekly estimated that a quarter of women in England earned their own wage (although they did not specify the age, race or class of the women they discussed).19 But while women were officially employed and taking on positions of responsibility, there were many attempts to delegitimise their appearance in masculinised spaces. For example, in 1903, a woman named Mabel Truelove was reported to have seventy-​seven convictions for trespassing on the railways.20 She extensively travelled the London and North Western Railway and was said to have explored ‘every mile of the system.’21 Truelove evaded police by journeying up and down the line between Euston and Crewe before being caught and imprisoned at Stafford. Determined to find a permanent position on board a train, she claimed she was willing to dress in a man’s suit and disguise her gender in order to gain employment upon her release. However, Truelove’s obsession with travel, her interest in trains and desire for employment was at odds with preconceived notions of femininity. Both the authorities, and the newspaper article, sought to restrict Truelove. She was physically confined in a prison cell and figuratively contained in print. Moreover, the headline, ‘Mania for Travelling: Woman Who Almost Lives on the Railway’ fixed Truelove in a domestic space by equating the train with the home. The suggestion of mania simultaneously alluded to her mental state, which 115

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From Steam to Screen connected her to an interior, private arena. Despite Truelove’s effort to escape the role allotted her within society, patriarchal forces intervened and used physical and linguistic barriers to limit her movements. In her work on women subjects in paintings from the turn of the twentieth century, Kristina Huneault asserts that women’s physical containment and framing as typically feminine was a common motif.22 She proposes that women’s representation as packagers (of objects including cigarettes and artificial flowers) is connected to the visual packaging of the subjects: women must be ‘enclosed, delimited and constrained.’23 The woman employee’s threat to the masculine world of industry therefore required that she be ‘positioned safely inside the boundaries’ of femininity. The notion that women were people, rather than objects or commodities subject to packaging and display, was still an uncertain one even within the British legal system. As late as 1909, the House of Lords needed convincing that women should be granted the status of ‘persons’ under British law.24 Until politicians recognised women as ‘persons,’ British women were mere bodies, or objects. Nevertheless, women successfully fought for political recognition of their rights by campaigning both for better working conditions and the vote.25 One film, A Suffragette’s Dream, imagined a world in which women had equal status to men.26 The narrative centred on a woman who, freed from the confines of domestic duties, ‘goes to the cafes, there to discuss politics and smoke cigars, while the mere man is “the victim,” and with flowers and ribbons in his garments he is now the one to look after the baby at home.’27 Of course, the suffragette’s dream is just that, and her husband soon wakes her and chides her for not doing the housework. The film both allowed a space for women to participate in an egalitarian society and simultaneously circumscribed their liberation through fantasy and humour. Women’s access to public space was legitimised when, owing to conscription in the First World War, women were called upon to work in roles traditionally filled by men. It was women’s labour in the visible arenas of factories, farms, railways and cinemas, and so on, that precipitated major change in how women occupied the public sphere.28 In the ensuing European conflict men were recruited into the armed forces and women’s labour was necessary to fill vacant jobs. But despite legislation, 116

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Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman and the demand for women employees, positions of responsibility were not given to them unless in exceptional circumstances. For example, the police were required to grant dispensation for rail companies to employ women staffs, which led to disparities in the gendering of the labour force across the country.29 Women were employed in roles including conductors, postwomen, telegraph messengers, cleaners and guards for light railway companies  –​however only nine light railways agreed to hire women at all.30 In Cardiff, two hundred women were ‘loyally helped by the men’ in joining trade unions relevant to the rail industries.31 But in London, the trade unions remained opposed to women’s employment and so the police refused railway companies’ requests to hire them.32 And in Birmingham one man was so opposed to women’s authority in the public sphere that he was tried in court for refusing to accept a woman conductor’s right to bar his entry to the vehicle without a ticket.33 While discourses about social cohesion in wartime made useful propaganda, the individual and local experiences of women workers undermined the myth of national unity and demonstrated that gender still determined one’s access to, and inhabitation of, public space. For the women that did work on the wartime railways, subject to consent from their local authorities, their roles replicated tasks traditionally associated with the home. The British Pathé film Women Railway Workers (c1914), comprised a series of vignettes that depicted the types of work women were undertaking as part of the war effort.34 In the picture, women scrub trains, clean carriage windows and fix posters to hoardings, which is an activity reminiscent of hanging wallpaper. Their activities are domestic chores transferred to the railway, with the nation’s rail infrastructure on the home front standing in for the private houses in which similar work would be socially acceptable. Thus women remained confined to traditional gender roles; evidence that, while women citizens by 1914 had improved status with regard to labour, so far as ideological discourses were concerned, little had changed. Virginia Woolf asserts that, before 1918, ‘addressing envelopes’, ‘making artificial flowers’ and ‘teaching the alphabet to small children in a kindergarten’ were the main occupations open to middle-​class women.35 While the sites of women’s labour had expanded during the First World War to include railways, cinema projection boxes, and munitions 117

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From Steam to Screen factories, women’s tasks within the workplace continued to be couched in domestic terms. Moreover, despite women’s increased autonomy in the public realm, wartime cinema persisted in representing women characters as subject to danger. In The Midnight Mail (1915), Mary, the maid, is looking after her employer’s house, which, serving as both her workplace and her home, reveals the fluid nature of women’s roles in public and private arenas.36 Mary’s fiancé, Jack, is the stoker on the train that passes by the property, which further complicates her situation, for she exists in both the familial and industrial realms. While she is alone, thieves break into the house. When Mary walks in on the raiders and observes them committing a crime, they physically restrict her by tying her up and locking her inside the room. However, after loosening her bonds and recalling the Morse Code for SOS from her training as a typist, Mary signals the passing midnight mail train using the light switch, and the police soon arrive to apprehend the thieves. Through Mary’s knowledge of modern technologies –​her skill in using code and quick-​thinking application of it by way of the electrics –​the film acknowledges her status as an independent and modern woman. Consequently, though, Mary marries Jack, who becomes the stationmaster and removes her from the world of work by providing her with a new home. While she is capable of saving herself from the perils of the break in, the film suggests that no single, working woman will ever be safe. Thanks in part to women’s contribution to the war effort as part of the workforce, ongoing suffrage campaigns, and a broad political will to enfranchise greater numbers of the population following the conflict, government passed the Representation of the People Act in 1918. Yet women’s enfranchisement was not equal with men’s (women had to be aged over twenty-​eight to vote), and women faced redundancy as troops demobilised and men returned to their former jobs. Many employers sought to relegate women workers to domestic roles for fear that demobilised men would be unemployed, and in a culture that equated masculinity with work and providing for the family, the prospect of losing out on a job to a woman was conceived as an emasculating experience.37 As such, an article in The Times suggested that, while the country was ‘convinced […] of the value of woman-​power,’ those women who could rely on a husband or family 118

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Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman member’s income should retire from work.38 The writer feared that ‘having tasted the sweets of independence and the interest of regular outside work, [many married women] are unwilling to return to a dependent and desultory existence’. While the report acknowledged the inferior lifestyle available to women confined to domestic environments (who would have a ‘desultory existence’), it simultaneously asked that women accept their lot. While many women did leave the workforce after the war, others stayed in post or in new positions in Britain’s increasingly consumer-​oriented culture. In addition, the 1918 election was the first since women had won the right to stand as Members of Parliament, and in December that year, Emily Phipps became the first woman to stand as a parliamentary candidate for the London borough of Chelsea.39 An article in The Times described Phipps’s ambitions, demonstrating not only women’s increased political visibility, but also a shift in how women’s experiences were elucidated.40 The report used geographical words (‘space’, ‘length’, ‘opening’) in setting out Phipps’s aims, which indicated her emergence into the public realm, and qualifying language that suggested women’s roles might expand further still. Women’s issues ‘occup[ied] a larger space’ in Phipps’s campaign than in her opponent’s (all italics my own); she was prepared to carry her principles to a ‘very great length’; and she demanded ‘the opening of all trades and professions’ to women candidates.41 An anecdote about Phipps’s women supporters, who ‘paraded the streets’ bearing posters ‘illuminated […] by portable lamps’ also furthered the narrative about women’s increasing presence in public life, for the women asserted their rights to participate in political processes, their rights to mobility and their rights to visibility. The lamps not only served to light up the posters, but also drew attention to women’s presence in political debate. Although Phipps did not win the seat, her demand that all trades and professions admit women was soon met when the Sex Disqualification Removal Act 1919 challenged gender discrimination in the workplace.42 Nevertheless, the legislation was a partial victory, for while in theory women were equal to men, in practice they remained oppressed, and equal pay was still a disputed topic. As such, women’s participation in capitalist networks of exchange was still dependent on patriarchal regulation. 119

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From Steam to Screen Wage records for employees on the railways also reveal gendered inconsistencies in workers’ values to industry. Women often held positions as clerks for the rail companies, performing administrative duties in offices; they had limited employment options and did not perform in traditionally masculine roles such as engine drivers, porters or stationmasters. In 1920, the pay rate for all women clerks was the same as for boy clerks (aged under eighteen years of age).43 Girl clerks (also aged under eighteen) earned only half the rate for women and boys.44 The Railway Clerks’ Association (RCA) disagreed with the employment terms and rates of pay, arguing that ‘the work carried out by Female Clerks was comparable to that performed by males and justified equality of treatment.’45 Both the RCA and the National Union of Railwaymen also asked that women received the same pay and privileges as men with regard to night duty.46 When the Minister of Transport and the unions failed to resolve the issues, both sides agreed to consider abolishing all women clerks’ night work.47 Hence the 13,031 women railway staffs faced further restrictions, rather than freedoms, in ongoing disputes about employment and remuneration.48 Similarly, Caroline Merz argues that, in the film industry, women struggled to gain employment in feature production in any other role than the star, as masculine-​oriented ideology confined women to posts as scriptwriters, editors, and continuity girls.49 Although women had long used railways and cinemas as passengers and spectators, and were essential to the legitimisation of both nascent technologies, patriarchal culture limited women’s mobility and visibility in public space by challenging their status as producers, rather than consumers. Of course, women’s employment was vital not only in providing women with an income, but also greater opportunities to participate in consumer culture alongside men. Miriam Glucksmann outlines the connections between women’s work and commoditisation in the interwar years, proposing that capitalist processes increased women’s presence in industrial spaces, and she argues that mass consumption in the 1920s not only changed the kinds of domestic products that women bought (for example, tinned food and electrical appliances), but also the types of work that they carried out.50 Hence women’s participation in public life was predicated on their participation in the practices of buying and selling their time, 120

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Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman services and goods, which contributed in a positive way to the nation’s economy. Accordingly, there were vocal champions of women’s work in the daily press, with many columnists encouraging families to support young women through education and in employment. For example, the Daily Mail admonished parents that pushed their daughters into jobs with limited options, or, indeed, marriage, after college.51 The writer suggested that girls ‘aim high’ when choosing their future careers, and eschewed the idea that marriage was an alternative to work at a time when employers often forced married women to leave their positions. Writing in The Times, the Warden of King’s College for Women offered similar advice, and proposed that women’s education should not be with a view to marriage.52 And in the Manchester Guardian, a columnist praised women’s work as being ‘of national value and importance,’ and noted that ‘restricted opportunities of training mean waste of good material, nay, of the best of all material –​ namely, the material of human brains and characters.’53 In some cases, at least, women’s increased presence in public life was commended. Throughout the 1920s, news reports also drew attention to women’s successes in conventionally masculine roles, and emphasised their ability to participate in the public realm in innovative ways. For instance, an article about agriculture in the Manchester Guardian claimed that women were taking on an increasing share of work within the industry and praised their efforts.54 However, while the writer in that case discussed a group of women, more commonly, reports identified a single woman that broke the mould and so was promoted because she was not like other women. One such example was Ruth Loch, who took on a managerial position to become the second Woman Establishment Officer at the Post Office and was responsible for overseeing 70,000 women within the organisation.55 On the one hand, the article announcing her appointment was congratulatory. On the other, it perhaps inadvertently positioned Loch as having management characteristics that most other women lacked. A  British Pathé film about a woman stationmaster, A One Woman Job!, had the same effect.56 For while the newsreel item lauded the woman –​‘[a]‌lady “Station-​master-​Porter-​Clerk-​Collector” all in one on a quaint little line near Shrewsbury’ –​the film ultimately undermined women’s labour. The unnamed station mistress, introduced only as ‘Eve’ in a reductive attempt 121

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From Steam to Screen to make her represent every woman, is nevertheless undertaking a ‘one woman job’, that she alone is capable of operating. Moreover, her running a ‘quaint little line’ suggests that on a busy intercity route, Eve would not succeed alongside men. Also undermining the women’s appearance on the railway was The Railway Queen (1929), a newsreel item that recorded the custom of electing a young girl as ‘queen’, or public representative, of a railway company.57 The tradition, emerging from countryside carnivals, not only codified the railway as feminine (‘queen’ gendering the transport system just as Britannia gendered the nation), but also transformed the woman’s image into a visual metaphor for the rail firm. The ‘queen’ was objectified and her body commoditised to advertise a product. In the film, the newly crowned queen is dressed in a flowing white gown, with her hair held by a wreath of flowers. Her train pulls into the station and she steps down onto the platform, where she is greeted by maids-​in-​waiting that are also dressed in white. The queen then receives a bouquet and is seated on a throne adorned with the Union Jack flag. Finally, she is borne through the crowd on the back of truck. The railway queen is not only virginal, but also bridal in her appearance. In a ceremony imbued with overt religious symbolism, the girl wears a wedding dress, holds a wedding bouquet and is married to the nation as she joins the British flag on the throne. The young girl is looked at, and so is a spectacle in her representation of Britannia. But she does not display self-​ consciousness. There is no knowing glance at the camera, nor any evidence that she is playing a part. Throughout the film, the girl has the performance thrust upon her. She is not in control of her mobility, for it is the crowd that carries her along. While Conor’s argument about the self-​aware performing woman no doubt holds true in some cases, not all women participated in visual culture so self-​consciously. As such, women’s encounters with technologies such as the railway and film were governed by men’s oversight and direction.

Dangerous Machines While gender, class, race and other factors, such as disability, determined one’s access to the public and industrial realm, experiencing modernity 122

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Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman by way of machines that included locomotives, projectors, and factory equipment, was commonplace. Yet despite the ubiquity of technology in communal and domestic spaces, people had anxieties about the safety of everyday objects. Unlike the conceptual problems connected to speed and perspective that arose when audiences first saw train effect films, and the specific dangers posed by automatic weapons and wartime equipment, the machinery that people handled or were in proximity to in their daily lives put them at constant risk. Malfunctioning technology that emitted hot steam, sparks or churned-​up metal presented a threat to workers and consumers alike, and the daily press regularly reported accidents involving machines that caused injury or loss of life. Print and onscreen news reports rendered the catastrophic outcomes of technological disasters as part of the visual spectacle of the modern age, alongside moving images and electric light.58 In particular, train crashes and cinema fires (with the latter less popular on screen than the former) provided news media with stunning scenes of chaos and destruction that fiction films such as R W Paul’s A Railway Collision (1900) could only hope to emulate.59 And, as well as serving the needs of the newspaper and newsreel companies that sought to make profit from the visually impressive reports, narratives about accidents also complemented discourses about the dangers that women faced in the public sphere. For while machines could, and did, break down without discrimination, reports about the events tended to focus on women victims. In his work on conceptions of modernity in British culture, historian Bernhard Rieger argues that because technology, which ‘defined modernity in many eyes,’ had finite precision, the industrial era necessarily presented an element of risk.60 Moreover, he proposes that people accepted that danger was implicit in modern life, with factories understood as hazardous workplaces, and fairground thrill rides transforming perilous technologies into entertainment.61 To an extent his argument stands up, for when applied to men, evidence suggests that accepting risk was necessary in the performance of masculinity. But for women, the dangers posed by machinery in public, rather than domestic, spaces were presented by news media as unwarranted because women in general, and middle-​class women in particular, could reside in the home. As a result, the more visible 123

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From Steam to Screen and mobile women became in the public sphere, the more likely they were to be blamed for their autonomy if a disaster occurred. Thus the exploration of rail crashes and cinema fires in British culture intersects with ideologies about gender and equality, as patriarchal media stories about accidents were designed to circumscribe women’s freedoms through fear. To provide context for investigating the intersections of technological disasters and women’s encounters with modernity, I offer a brief overview of the ways that rail and cinema accidents and safety issues were represented in popular culture. Disasters on the railways and in cinemas in Britain were at various points in time common, and resulted in enormous numbers of casualties. High-​profile rail smashes, such as that experienced by Charles Dickens when his train derailed and crashed over a bridge in Kent, were widely reported in newspapers and garnered great public attention.62 As a consequence of physical and psychological traumas experienced on the railway, evidence suggests that passengers might suffer ‘neurasthenia’ and ‘railway spine’ after accidents had occurred.63 By the 1880s, though, railway accidents peaked in number and improving safety standards brought about a decline in associated injuries.64 At the turn of the twentieth century, authorities sought to enhance safety for workers and passengers further still through legislation. The Railways (Prevention of Accidents) Bill passed through parliament in 1900, and was designed to make rail companies responsible for their staffs’ welfare.65 The Bill enabled ‘the Board of Trade to make rules to prevent unnecessary danger in carrying out the dangerous parts of railway work’, and imposed penalties on railway companies who did not comply with those rules.66 That the Bill was specifically created to aid workers, who were typically men, suggests that the men employed on the lines, rather than passengers, were most at risk in the railway environment. Consequently, owing to the government and railway company’s measures to upgrade safety features, there were no deaths on the British rail network in 1901.67 Although the clean record did not last longer than a year, the figure indicates that, for passengers, trains represented a relatively safe form of mechanised transport. Similarly to the railways, the cinematograph was perceived as a potentially dangerous apparatus that was liable to burst into flame. With 124

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Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman projectors often located in the middle of audiences, and in overcrowded, makeshift auditoriums, the effects were often lethal.68 In 1897, just two years after the Lumières popularised projected moving images, a fire at a film screening in a Parisian theatre was widely reported in national and local British newspapers and highlighted the particular risks of the technology to women.69 The Times reported that the fire, which began in a box occupied by a duchess and spread rapidly owing to the presence of celluloid, killed one hundred and fifty bourgeois and aristocratic women, who were attending a charity screening at the large, urban theatre. The article heightened the drama of the event through the eyewitness account of ‘an English gentleman’, who described his wife’s escape from the burning building. By including the couple’s story, the report collapsed the distance between France and Britain and stoked fears about the apparatus’s safety on both sides of the Channel. In response to the risk of fire that highly flammable celluloid coupled with hot projection lamps posed to spectators, industry experts attempted innovative mechanical solutions, while the government imposed stricter safety regulations. Thus, in 1908, eager to create safer exhibition practices to prevent losing audience numbers, representatives from major film producers, including Urban and Co., Gaumont, and the Lumières, attended a fire prevention conference at the London Hippodrome.70 And in 1909, parliament ratified the Cinematograph Act, which imposed rules on exhibition spaces, including having accessible and visible exits, as well as buckets of sand and water to prevent the spread of fire.71 Furthermore, the Act suggested that the operator was ultimately responsible for ensuring safety. However, when accidents and fires continued to occur, it was not projectionists, but rather the women inhabiting the mechanised, public space of the movie theatres, that were maligned by news media. Strict safety regulations improved people’s experiences of railway and cinema environments, but did not entirely overcome the potential for accidents. And when train crashes and other visually exciting disasters happened, photography and the moving image ensured the news was disseminated in spectacular fashion. That railway accidents featured more frequently in print and on screen is not, I propose, because they were necessarily more common than cinema fires. Rather, I contend that train accidents 125

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From Steam to Screen signified a breaking down of modernity on a national, or even imperial, scale, whereas movie theatres represented only the local. Additionally, newsreel companies would have preferred the drama of the railway smash to that of the cinema fire, which would have been bad for business. So while the daily press covered movie theatre fires, films focused on the train as a locus for risk instead of the auditorium, and when fires did occur on screen, they were only vicariously connected to the apparatus. Consequently, from the cinema of attractions through to interwar narratives about precarious women, the moving image emphasises the perilous nature of the railway. Nevertheless, both in print and on screen, the train crash served as a visceral and tangible reminder of humans’ uneasy relationship with modern technologies. A variety of despatches from railway accident sites focused on malfunctioning machinery’s impact on the body, and used language that evoked fear about what happened when modernity went wrong. For example, after a crash near Grantham, passengers were forcibly ‘hurled’ from the train in the disaster.72 After another, the train had ‘left the rails, torn up the sleepers, and twisted the metals before it finally stopped,’ which implied that the locomotive had a powerful autonomy that could destroy the railway infrastructure of its own accord.73 Yet another recounted: a horrible medley of smashing metal and escaping steam. Around it were twisted the telegraph wires that it tore down as it plunged, it was crushed into little pieces, and all that remained of it was scrap iron […] Amid shrieks of terror these two carriages were telescoped one into the other. Over the edge of the embankment they were hurled; and then lay on their sides crushed, distorted masses of matchwood.74

Metal, steam, telegraph wires and telescoping all signified that the crash, which killed fifty people, was the product of industrialisation, and that mass casualties were a by-​product of mass consumption. Alongside articles, newspapers printed pictures of wrecked engines and carriages broken into ‘matchwood,’ and so turned tragedy into consumable spectacle.75 Moreover, photographs and newsreel images provided the public with evidence of the scale of the accident, which helped authorities justify the duration of line closures and clean-​up operations. Whereas other 126

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Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman disasters, such as cinema fires, tended to be localised tragedies that only inconvenienced bystanders inasmuch as they had to visit a different venue (at a time when there were usually multiple theatres in any given town), railway crashes had a more profound impact on national infrastructures. Following a crash, thousands of people might be stranded waiting for the line to clear, while goods such as coal that were vital not only to networks of consumption, but also to the administration of empire, ceased moving. As such, reports frequently commented on chaotic attempts to keep passengers and cargo mobile alongside details about the loss of human life, which created equivalence between personal tragedies and national trade. Thus a collision in Yorkshire ‘had the effect of disorganising the service between Sheffield and York, and telegraphic communication between North and South by this route was cut off.’76 And after a disaster near Dundee in Scotland, which killed fifteen people, the Pall Mall Gazette considered it important that authorities manage to clear a line to continue running passenger trains in the aftermath.77 The public interest in restoring order to the network demonstrates the train’s significance to the national economy, and so also accounts for the representation of women as victims in rail crashes. For, as reimagined in The Railway Queen, the figure of Britannia, a woman, represented the nation. Consequently, when a woman was described or appeared as a casualty, she denoted a greater calamity in national life. On screen, train crashes frequently featured in newsreels, such as Railway Accident (1910), Goods Train Wreck Blocks Mainline (1934) and Disastrous Train Collision (1935), as well as features.78 Cinema fires, which were widely reported in the national press, did not receive the same attention on screen –​there are not, to my knowledge, extant examples of newsreels reporting such incidents in the British Pathé or British Movietone News archives. The likely explanation is that depicting movie theatre fires in the auditoriums would cause panic among spectators in the short term, and dissuade customers from attending screenings altogether in the long term. That is not to suggest that films eschewed fire scenes altogether, with Life of an American Fireman (1903) an early example of a popular narrative picture featuring a burning building.79 The controversial Marie Stopes film about contraception, Married Love (1923), also featured a dramatic 127

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From Steam to Screen fire (and another rescue dog), which, like its predecessors, occurred in a domestic space.80 As Giuliana Bruno argues, the comforts of the picture ‘house’ are congruent with the home.81 The domestic fire, therefore, vicariously acknowledged the threat and spectacle of the conflagrating cinema without alarming audiences. Rieger proposes that the emphasis on transport disasters in news media was due to the Cinematograph Act’s impact on safety, which resulted in people perceiving cinema as a cultural, rather than a material, threat.82 However, his claim overlooks the persistent danger posed to audiences in general, and women in particular, by immolating celluloid. Although non-​flammable film was available to movie theatres, it was prone to buckling and made splicing difficult. Consequently, many projectionists continued using flammable celluloid and received mandatory training to contact the local fire brigade in the event of a fire.83 Correspondence about a potential film show at Dartmoor Prison in 1923 suggests that flammable nitrate film was still in circulation, as the projectionist at Associated First National Pictures advised postponing the summer event to the autumn to avoid a fire occurring in hot weather.84 So persistent was the problem that, in 1932, London authorities banned screenings inside wooden structures in an attempt to improve public safety.85 As late as 1936, operator David Robinson described the effects of seeing a nitrate film fire during his training, as the flames went ‘[w]‌hoosh! […] straight up to the ceiling.’86 He also revealed an industry-​wide code word for a fire in the movie theatre (‘Mr Drage’), which indicates the persistent fear among managers and operators that a film might catch alight. As with locomotives, there was no guarantee of safety when operating film apparatus, and for audiences attending the cinema, there was always an element of risk. But while all machines were dangerous and posed hazards to anyone that encountered them, women (especially those inhabiting industrial sites) not only were casualties of, but also bore responsibility for, disasters. In one projectionist’s words, the immolating film, like many locomotives, was gendered as a woman. Thus, when feeding the celluloid through the machine’s fire trap, ‘if she did get back as far as that you might as well just run, because once she gets in there she’s going to explode.’87 Eliding the woman and the apparatus, the operator makes the universal ‘she’ –​all 128

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Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman women  –​responsible for the conflagration, and deflects accountability away from the usually male projectionist. Accordingly, women were not only in danger in public space, but also the cause of their own victimhood.

Precarious Women How women moved and looked (in terms of looking and being looked at) were central to anxieties about their interventions in public space and work places, and narratives about the intrinsic dangers facing women in the public realm were prevalent in print and on screen. The world outside the home was historically portrayed as dangerous for women; any woman who occupied, or appeared in, industrial space therefore placed herself in jeopardy.88 Feminist scholars including Richter and Miriam Hansen assert that, while women were culturally aligned with the private sphere, railways and cinemas enabled them to expand their mobility while maintaining propriety. Richter suggests that on trains, ‘ladies were not always “ladylike,” yet the trains were depicted as public spaces in which women could maintain their respectability beyond the home.’89 Hansen likewise proposes that the cinema offered women an alternative public sphere.90 Yet, as Stamp’s work on early women filmgoers reveals, there were tensions between the positive impact of women’s consumerism and ideology that dictated women had no place in industry. Exhibitors hoped that encouraging women into the audience would ‘lend an air of refinement to the establishments they frequented’ and thus give credibility to the new industry. However, ‘behind this fascination lurked an unease about the presence of women at theatres.’91 As evidence indicates, patriarchal society never entirely accepted women’s presence in either environment, and women’s bodies and reputations were subject to harm in both carriages and auditoriums. In the daily press, stories abounded about the fate of women who travelled alone on the railways or attended film screenings. The Daily Telegraph was especially conscientious in reminding readers of the perils women faced in the outside world, and featured a plethora of reports about dangerous train journeys. The publication established a causal link between women entering, or traversing, public space and resulting bodily harm, with tales of violence enacted on women in public arenas reminding the 129

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From Steam to Screen population that women were only secure within the home. For example, single pub landlady Annie Elizabeth Camp was murdered in a London and South Western railway carriage after visiting her sister.92 On a Brighton-​ bound service, Laura Clarke was travelling alone when she was partially strangled, kicked and robbed by a male assailant.93 And Miss Low, a lady’s companion and ‘qualified English nurse’, suffered multiple stab wounds on a sleeper train between Turin and Paris; the examining doctor observed ‘three wounds on her head, her hair, which was short, being covered with blood.’94 His noting the length of her hair is a seemingly unnecessary detail in the context of his medical report. Yet her short cut suggests that she is a ‘modern’ and mobile woman who is both exposed to, and responsible for, her attack. What is more, the newspaper failed to acknowledge that, while the women were killed or injured inhabiting the industrial space of the railway, it was men, not machines, which caused harm. Similarly, when a fire broke out during a film screening in a Chatham music hall, ‘some of the lads clambered over the bars, and dropped down into the balcony,’ from the gallery, while in the rush to the exit, ‘several women fainted.’95 The report implied that men were equipped to cope with the inherent risks associated with machines, while women were not. Thus women experienced a doubly misogynistic response to their appearance in public space: they were victimised by men, and what we now call ‘victim blamed’ by the patriarchal press. In larger scale disasters, the press persisted in emphasising women casualties even when men featured more heavily on lists of injured people. After one train collision, in which over fifty people died and many others were wounded, an eyewitness overlooked the men involved in the event and focused instead on the women and children, who ‘were everywhere crying most piteously.’96 The Times adopted the same strategy when reporting a film screening that ended in catastrophe in Ireland.97 The article downplayed the men’s presence at a makeshift screening above a garage by emphasising the presence of the women and children ‘packed’ into the room, like consumable goods. When the fire broke out, ‘the crowd surged towards the door’ and ‘many women and children were trampled under foot’. Meanwhile, the men in attendance tried ‘gallantly’ to save the women and young people, many of whom needed urgent medical attention. Yet while the writer positioned women as victims and men as their saviours, 130

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Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman of the eighteen dead whose names initially appeared in print, nine were women and girls, and nine were men and boys. As such, The Times perpetuated myths about women’s precariousness in proximity to machines and suggested that their position in public space was fragile. Moreover, the man operating the projector, who attempted to throw the burning film through a window, intensified the fire (which was started by a cigarette or candle), as ‘the flames were so fierce that they caught other films which were lying on a table, apparently without protection of any kind.’98 As in examples of women being attacked on the railway, the man responsible for the blaze was absolved of his liability, while the women casualties were implicitly blamed for attending the show. Another report of a cinema fire made explicit the connections between women, work and danger under the attention-​grabbing headline ‘Girls in Flames Leap from Blazing Film Store’.99 In 1927, a fire broke out at the Film Waste Co. facility at St Pancras, London. While many of the all-​women workforce escaped, the four workers in the winding room (where the fire started) were killed by the blaze.100 The Daily Mirror article about the event claimed the victims were unable to escape the burning celluloid that they usually handled as part of their daily routines, and so implied that the women were killed by their work. The press report did not speculate as to the implementation of safety procedures at the premises, even though the hazards of working with flammable celluloid were well known. Rather, the article represented the deaths as resulting from the women’s choice to participate in industrial labour; that the women inhabited a public and mechanical site was their ultimate cause of death. In the aftermath of the fire, the newspaper updated readers on scenes from the inquests, and listed the women’s names and ages. The victims, aged between fifteen and nineteen, were Ada Baker, Lillian Wells, May Smith, and Mrs Bartlett.101 The writer described ‘[p]‌oignant scenes’ featuring the sobbing, bereaved families, some of whom were so distressed they left the courtroom. The article’s focus on the emotional toll of the women’s deaths, and their familial attachments, underscored the sentiment in the earlier report that they were misplaced in the workforce and instead belonged at home. The danger that women faced in public space, and the moral threat that mobile women posed to patriarchal culture, was further elucidated in 131

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From Steam to Screen response to a League of Nation’s report on people trafficking.102 The organisation’s investigation focused on women and children in response to public concern about the illegal practice of sex work and women’s coercion into criminal gangs. In the Daily Mail’s report, ‘Traffic in Women’, the writer emphasised the connection between travel, transport and women’s bodies, and in doing so reduced the woman subject to a commoditised object that was despatched and received in a transaction. The story drew on what Kristen Whissel, examining modernity in the United States, suggests was ‘the difficulty of being able to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate traffic and of knowing whether one is an agent of or a commodity within traffic.’103 Furthermore, through the publication’s own objectification of women, the Daily Mail demonstrated that the correlation between women and property was not confined to the distant world of trafficking. Within one week of the League of Nations article going to print, the newspaper again emphasised the link between women’s bodies, ownership and danger –​although this time much closer to home, as readers were told that ‘Wives May Not Be Beaten’.104 The headline referred to a story in which three men (in separate cases) were found guilty of assault; all claimed ignorance that the law prevented husbands beating wives. That the British public needed reminding that women were not property but persons suggests women citizens were actually under threat in both public and private realms. However, in popular culture at least, the home was routinely configured as a safe space compared to the outside world. Also incorporated in the risk of entering the public realm was the perceived threat to women of appearing in public space. How well a woman maintained her femininity impacted how deserving she was of her fate in the event of violence. Having short hair and eschewing a traditionally feminine appearance signified that a woman was mobile and independent, and so was especially open to attacks in the daily press. Women travelling alone were also associated with notions of promiscuity, as denoted by the Victorian term ‘street-​walkers’, which alluded to sex work and might be deployed against any woman that left the security of the domestic realm.105 As Judith Walkowitz argues in her work on women consumers in the Victorian period, in public environments, men stripped women of their autonomy so that on the street, women were ‘bearers of meaning rather 132

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Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman than makers of meaning.’106 Thus, even in the interwar period, women had to appear virtuous when they appeared in public, and advertising aimed at women consumers demonstrates the complex ways in which they negotiated seemingly dangerous industrial environments. For example, an Ensign photography promotion showed a young girl in a conservative white dress being directed by her companions to take pictures in a countryside garden.107 The girl appears a model of traditional femininity in white clothes and with a display of deference to her elders. In another example, a Lux soap advertisement aimed at women emphasised the product’s ‘purer and milder’ qualities.108 The modern girl, Lux claimed, was ‘capable and practical’; she travelled with few clothes and packed luggage that she lifted herself. The middle-​class woman consumer was mobile and ‘modern’, and assumed to be a traveller with the means (and so the earnings) to journey alone. But while traversing public space, she bore certain responsibilities: she must demonstrate frugality, purity and mildness. While women were expected to appear chaste in public, the artificiality of their appearance, and thus performance, was recognised by advertisers. Lux, for instance, acknowledged that the product was suitable for washing ‘artificial’ fabrics that only had the appearance of silk.109 In proposing that women’s visibility was connected to ‘superficiality’, Conor riffs on the phrase ‘seeing is believing’ to explore how women changed their appearances with cosmetics and self-​consciously performed the image-​making process.110 She proposes that the new possibility of artifice, or uncertainty of truth, in the female form upset the traditional positioning of men as subjects and women as objects.111 Moreover, her interpretation likens women to the flâneur, a male figure that emerged in France in the nineteenth century, who roamed the streets both looking, and being looked at, by others. Walkowitz describes the flâneur as an ‘illusionist’ who ‘transformed the landscape’ with his presence.112 Akin to the flâneur, modern women transformed and used their bodies to alter public space through performance, and both the Ensign and Lux advertisements featured women who self-​consciously appeared chaste while recognising their own enactment of propriety. In the former, the white-​clad girl points a camera at another girlish figure, also dressed in white: she is looking at a mediated, or reflected, self. In the latter, the woman reader is invited to see herself as the fictional 133

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From Steam to Screen modern woman in a process predicated on self-​recognition. Nevertheless, the advertisements reveal how complexly circumscribed women’s appearances were in the public realm, and how difficult it was for women to justify their mobility when danger allegedly lurked behind every carriage or auditorium corner. Contrary to the dangerous image of the railway and cinema depicted in the daily press, both trains and movie theatres were relatively safe environments. In 1925, railway accidents in Britain resulted in only one death (although 3,380 were injured and seventy died in falling from platforms or crossing the line).113 And in 1928, Lord Monkswell assured the public that despite hazardous incidents still occurring across the network, ‘railways remain by far the safest means of mechanical transport.’114 Just two years later, in 1930, the scale of the 6,000-​seat auditorium constructed at Elephant and Castle in London, reputedly ‘the biggest picture house in Europe,’ suggests that the government had faith in cinema’s safety, too.115 Nevertheless, women continued to be cast as victims in any mechanical malfunction, no matter how minor. For example, when an overnight mail train hit the buffers at Euston, and two coaches derailed, over one hundred passengers were on board. Yet, despite the ‘violent impact’ causing alarm among many travellers, ‘only one woman complained of shock.’116 In another accident involving a train at Liverpool Street, a report in the daily press prioritised the women casualties by writing that ‘[t]‌welve or more people, including some women who were standing on the footboard of the train ready to alight, were thrown onto the platform.’117 Throughout the interwar period, even when men working on the railway were routinely injured or killed in their labours, women made for more sensational and anxiety-​inducing headlines.118 Hence, the daily press consistently exposed readers to stories such as ‘Train Kills Mother and Her Baby’, ‘Riddle of Girl Under Train’, and ‘Girl With Red Beret Killed in Fall From Train’, in which a woman with bobbed hair –​a modern woman –​was found dead beside the track.119 Rhetoric about women consumers on railways, and in cinemas, was clear: women were ill-equipped to inhabit public space and were in perpetual danger outside the home. Despite women successfully fighting for equal enfranchisement with men, their appearance in public remained limited.120 134

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Precarious Modern Women and Onscreen Machines If the movie theatre was a picture house, it provided women no respite from narratives about the perils of consumption and labour in the public realm. During the interwar period a trend for railway films featuring women sleuths emerged in response to the women’s ostensible autonomy, which sought to reinforce discourses about women’s unsuitability for engaging with modern life. Here, I  discuss seven extant films, of which there are at least thirteen, with six unavailable in public archives.121 While the available films vary in their scope, they all examine themes including women’s work, mobility, visibility and consumerism. The films are congruent with the broader historical attitudes outlined in the previous section, in that women enter into public space, yet are subject to conservative attempts to limit them. On screen, the amateur detectives initially enjoyed independent movement and spectatorship until finding themselves under threat from violence enacted by men or machines. The women characters are mobile, and travel across Britain or Europe on public railway transport. However, they have limited social mobility, and must eventually defer to men to extricate themselves from danger. The corpus portrays the railway as a dangerous site for women to inhabit or to appear, and women travellers are always beset by male aggression. In order to survive in the world, they must undergo a transformation from active labourers into docile consumers receptive to patriarchal influence. Furthermore, attesting to the cultural tensions surrounding women’s usefulness as agents of mass consumption and their ideologically dubious status as producers, they frequently appear in liminal spaces, such as doorways, which position their bodies on the threshold between public and private realms. Women’s sight is also contested, for their journeys are observed by men and yet also present opportunities to engage in surveillance, and in all seven cases, women carry out work on trains while participating in consumer culture as passengers. Within the corpus, five of the seven movies cast women as detectives, while in the other two (Number Seventeen, 1932 and Kate Plus Ten, 1938), the women conduct criminal activity on the railways. The topoi of the woman sleuth intersects with 135

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From Steam to Screen motifs about women as both spectacles and spectators, as the characters, who are observed by onscreen men and the offscreen audience, must search for visual clues inside the trains. As Judith Mayne argues, cinema makes visible ‘patriarchy’s most pervasive notions of the woman as other, whether as object of the look or as proof of narrative resolution; and as the site of multiple positions of desire.’122 Thus films expose the contradictions between women’s statuses as objects-​to-​be-​looked-​at and agents of vision. For example, the physical dangers facing mobile women were made explicit in the 1929 movie The Wrecker, a film based on a successful play and filmed on the Southern Railway.123 The story follows two would-​be detectives, Mary and Roger, who try to identify the culprits behind a series of fatal train wrecks that threaten to destroy the rail company that owns the line. After the first onscreen rail crash, survivors attempt to leave the upturned train, where, amid the chaos of metal and smoke, it is a woman’s body that viewers initially see trapped inside the destroyed vehicle. The film then cuts to the image of a newspaper article that reports on the crash. The headline ‘Jack the Wrecker at Work’ dominates the screen, an allusion to the nineteenth-​century serial killer Jack the Ripper, who targeted women sex workers in London’s East End. Thus the sequence establishes congruence between women’s appearance in public space and sexual threat, with men liable to violate women’s bodies either through a direct attack, or vicariously through sabotaging a train. In addition, the onscreen woman’s trapped body suggests that, like the victims of the Film Waste Co in London, women’s mobility leaves them vulnerable to malfunctioning technology that ultimately limits their freedom to move around industrial environments. Consequently, until Mary and Roger are able to track down the criminal behind the disasters, the train becomes an agent in an assault on women who dare to enter public space. Also in 1929, British women’s images on screen were accompanied for the first time by their voices. Blackmail (1929) is often cited as the first British ‘talkie’, following the introduction of sound technology to cinema three years earlier.124 The decade also witnessed a female representative in the House of Commons giving a speech before Parliament for the first time.125 As such, women, who were frequently silent as well as invisible participants in history, were no longer ‘keeping mum’, and women’s voices 136

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Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman infiltrated public debates (for example, Emily Phipps in The Times), and were amplified in picture houses.126 Of course, as with women’s visibility, audibility was subject to artifice. Anny Ondra, the star of Blackmail, mimed her lines throughout the film because her German accent was deemed too difficult for British audiences to understand. Actress Joan Barry (who remains invisible throughout the film) recorded the vocals for Ondra from the side of the set. Nevertheless, the popularity of sound cinema ensured British audiences regularly heard women’s voices in the public realm, and their ability to speak and be heard in masculinised spaces was central to railway thriller, Number Seventeen. One of the film’s criminal protagonists, Nora, initially works with a gang to steal a valuable necklace and export the item overseas, and the audience learns from the gang’s leader, Sheldrake, that she is both deaf and dumb. Throughout most of the early ‘talkie’, the woman protagonist is mute and denied a public voice: she exists only to be looked at, and so is merely a spectacle on the screen. However, Nora reveals she can speak when she talks to the detective Barton and double-​crosses the gang. In finding her voice, she is emancipated, and freed from the rules imposed on her by her male subjugator. Miss Ackroyd, a witness to Nora’s announcement, exclaims ‘[i]‌t’s just like the movies, isn’t it?’ The sound film thus provides women with a public platform from which they can effect change. However, Nora is not only a spectacle, but also a spectator, for she witnesses many of the gang’s criminal actions. As such, the villains are concerned that Nora knows too much about their operations. She is the subject, as well as the object, of looking, and so she threatens the men’s identities. Her work for the gang leads her into danger, and her mobility and seeing place her in peril when Sheldrake forces her to accompany the gang on a boat-​train. In doing so, he transforms her from an active agent into a passive piece of cargo, and she occupies the train not as a passenger, but a piece of luggage within a goods coach (see Figure 3.2). Hence, Nora becomes the loot: she embodies the stolen necklace and is exported like a commodity in a transaction –​like the women in the League of Nations report, she becomes part of the ‘traffic in women’. With her bobbed hair and initial mobility casting her as a modern woman, it comes as no surprise that Nora should suffer the consequences of straying outside conventional, 137

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From Steam to Screen

Figure 3.2  Nora is bundled inside the train like a parcel by the male gang-

sters in Number Seventeen (Associated British Picture Corp., 1932).

domesticated notions of femininity. When the train crashes at the docks, she is trapped inside the sinking carriage, and her containment within the coach is a stark reminder of the limitations on women’s movements outside the home. However, the train –​a liminal site that, as it travels, is neither here nor there –​is also a transformative space, for while it constrains Nora, it also enables her to re-​enter the world as an ideal woman –​a wife. In the water, she is cleansed of her former criminal life and rescued by Barton, and, as his fiancé, she is freed from the prospects of both jail and future employment. Nora is passed from one male owner to another, and with her working days behind her she is restored to society as a model of femininity. Alfred Hitchcock’s next film, The 39 Steps (1935), had much in common with Number Seventeen. Another railway thriller, the movie follows Richard Hannay’s journey from his accusation as a murderer in London to attempts to clear his name in Scotland. Annabella Smith, a spy whom Hannay meets at a London music hall, sets the story in motion when she fires a gun to create a diversion and escape from two threatening men who are seeking her 138

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Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman whereabouts. Smith flees with Hannay to his apartment, where she hides, and, desperate to conceal her identity, provides him with a false name. In an attempt to vanish from public space, she closes the curtains at the windows and even turns a mirror to the wall to avoid seeing herself, suggesting that through erasing her image she eradicates her identity. The audience soon learns that Annabella is a spy, and, like Nora, is a woman who has seen too much, for as the subject of looking, rather than the object being looked at, she poses a threat to her male pursuers. Of course, in doing so, Annabella puts herself in danger, for there is no place for an onscreen woman as an active spectator in interwar society. Analysing the film’s surveillance themes, Robin Wood contends that the espionage plot in The 39 Steps disguises a narrative about heterosexual gender relations under patriarchy.127 He cites what he calls Annabella’s ‘prostitution’ as evidence, in reference to the character’s assertion that she spies ‘for any country that pays me.’128 Her unconventional role as a woman who looks is therefore linked to promiscuity, which is one of the many dangers facing mobile, public women. The price she pays for her work is death –​and like many women before her, she is blamed for her own downfall as a consequence of her employment. Hannay’s second encounter with a woman occurs on the Flying Scotsman service on the Firth of Forth Bridge. The liminal site of Pamela’s carriage, which is neither here nor there as it journeys through space, and is crossing the transitory bridge, positions her on the threshold between the public and private realms. As such, her appearance in the industrial space of the railway is partially acceptable as she occupies the domestically furnished carriage. Nevertheless, as a mobile woman she is soon contained, for when Hannay bursts into the compartment he assumes control over her. On the run from the police, he is looking for a place to hide and grabs Pamela in a kiss as the detectives run past the window, forcing the police to avert their gazes from a public display of private affection. Caught in Hannay’s arms, Pamela’s spectacles fall from her lap, an occurrence that implies her autonomous perspective is subsumed into his during their enforced embrace. She is confined within a patriarchal space from her first appearance, for Hannay both invades her private compartment (and in doing so commands the site), and challenges her ability to see. Inside 139

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From Steam to Screen the train, Pamela, like Nora, is transformed from an independent, mobile woman to Hannay’s accomplice, and where he leads, she follows –​literally, as the pair is handcuffed together in a later sequence. Furthermore, the promotional material that accompanied The 39 Steps was predicated on women’s objectification, as the film’s advertising drew on the ways that audiences saw Madeleine Carroll, who played Pamela. The actress appeared in an article for Kinematograph Weekly, promising the film’s viewers that they would see her in a new light, for where once Carroll was seen as ‘reserved and dignified’, her role as Pamela revealed her as a comedic actress.129 In the article, Carroll demonstrates the self-​awareness that Conor attributes to the modern woman, as she instructs audiences’ readings of her image. However, her transformed appearance was a result of male intervention, for she claimed that her reinvention was Hitchcock’s idea; he told her ‘[y]‌ou won’t recognise yourself when I’ve finished with you!’130 The same focus on women losing their identities and changing their appearances in the film, then, was carried over into the movie’s advertising. Annabella effaced her identity by turning Hannay’s mirror away, and Pamela’s identity became secondary to Hannay’s when she dropped her glasses. So, too, Carroll’s identity as a dramatic actress was changed by her appearance in The 39 Steps. Hence the containment of public women was a trope used not only as a narrative device, but also a marketing ploy to draw in potential viewers. A similar motif inflected Seven Sinners in 1936.131 Although the film featured two American protagonists, John Harwood and Caryl Fenton, the movie dealt with the complex issues surrounding women’s work in British culture (and featured British writers and producers). In the film, Harwood occupies a Venetian hotel, awaiting an insurance investigator’s arrival from New York, and together the pair must attempt to track down a stolen necklace. He unwittingly meets his new colleague in a hotel elevator, where she is attempting to travel in a different direction from him inside the conveyance. Exasperated, Harwood begins an argument with his fellow traveller and soon discovers that the woman is his new partner, Fenton: ‘Why aren’t you a man?’ he demands. The internationally mobile woman surprises him, for she has assumed a typically masculine identity in both her travel and line of work. Her determination to decide the destination of the lift, 140

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Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman and her gender-​neutral nomenclature (the surname Fenton) are at odds with his understanding of femininity, and he perceives Fenton’s nondisclosure of her gender as artifice. He asks, irritably, ‘[w]‌hy didn’t you say in your telegram you were a woman?’ In keeping with Conor’s argument, Harwood’s position as subject is challenged by Fenton’s alleged recognition of her own object-​status.132 Fenton further challenges Harwood’s views on women’s work throughout the film. In his hotel bedroom, the frame is given over to her as Harwood disappears into an offscreen bathroom, enabling her to command the space. She hurries her colleague, organising his travels with demands to ‘[m]ake it snappy now!’ and insists on accompanying him across Europe to track down a criminal train wrecker. On the rail journey to Paris, she stakes out her personal space and occupies her own room, resisting Harwood’s attempts to share the twin sleeper cabin that he booked under the assumption that Fenton was a man. Despite the lack of alternate accommodation, she forces him to sleep in the luggage coach, and so temporarily inverts the trope of the woman as parcel. As she relegates him to a peripheral site, she inhabits the centre of the frame, putting her jacket and hat down in the room to codify the boundaries of her personal space. However, the ensuing train crash soon puts an end to the arrangement, and the railway is once again a transformative site with regard to women’s autonomy, as from this point on, Fenton follows, rather than leads, in the couple’s investigation. While Hardwood is shown dazed amid the train wreckage, it is Fenton for whom the accident has the greatest impact. For in the moments before the disaster, the film cuts back and forth between the train speeding towards imminent disaster and Fenton sleeping in her room: she is the figurative target of the train’s destruction, while Harwood is an accidental victim. Following the crash, Fenton becomes submissive to Harwood, and has to play along with his invented cover stories about their marriage, children and family life to obscure her identity as a detective throughout the journey. Consequently, he stakes out their inhabited space as a masculine one unfit for women to occupy, asserting that ‘I’ve got to get you out of here!’ Moreover, his claims that ‘this is a man’s job’ and that he will ‘do the thinking’ further undercut her authority, and she is demoted to marginal onscreen spaces, resting in doorways and on the thresholds between rooms. For example, at Guildhall, 141

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From Steam to Screen she tentatively approaches a door that leads to a private part of the building, and hovers on the boundary between public and private space until the tour guide (a man) catches her out and orders her to leave. Harwood’s demand that Fenton submit to patriarchal influence is vindicated when she breaks her necklace while the pair searches the criminals’ office. Her clumsiness draws attention to them, and guns shots are fired in their direction. Her decision to wear a necklace while carrying out practical work allegedly demonstrates her self-​interest in her appearance and unsuitable character for the job; that she causes the pair to be seen is also evidence of woman’s necessary role as an object to be looked at. While her self-​awareness at first confused Harwood’s subject-​status, her self-​recognition is here represented as a demeaning trait that reveals her as a commodity. Furthermore, supporting the film’s ideological positioning of women as products rather than producers is Fenton’s material absence from a later sequence in a cinema, where Harwood finally catches the train wrecker. In the auditorium, she exists only on the screen in a newsreel item about the pair’s investigation. She is mediated by her image, which stands in for her body, and so is changed from a woman worker with an individual identity into a spectacle. The final sequence, in which the couple are married, completes Fenton’s transformation from a mobile, unnatural woman into a conventional, domestic wife. Thus her train travel begins a process of subjugation that effaces her identity, for by the denouement Fenton no longer exists –​she is, instead, Harwood. Kate Plus Ten (1938) similarly represents a world in which women’s place in society was contested. Kate is a criminal who disguises herself as a secretary to gain access to a businessman’s house to spy on his transactions, for she secretly heads a gang who plan to steal a shipment of gold bullion. Her criminal activity aside, Kate represents the working, modern woman whose public appearance is artificial and who looks even while other spectators look at her. Like Nora, Annabella and Fenton, her identity is bound up in her image: it is Kate’s signed photograph (which provides the police with her writing sample) that confirms her involvement with the gang. In the film, Kate’s identity is reduced to that of her mediated image and the detective, Pemberton, is able to contain her through obtaining the photograph. His attempts to thwart her plans are aided by her defection 142

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Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman from the gang to a police informer, and a chase sequence on the railway that turns Kate into a passive, rather than an active, traveller. For while she is uncertain about the legitimacy of Pemberton’s plan to drive a train to London in a race against the gang, she has no option but to comply with the detective’s scheme. He drags her up the locomotive’s ladder and into the driver’s cabin, yelling at her all the while to ‘[g]‌et up there!’ as he despatches her like a parcel. The rail journey is, once again, a transformative one; for it is while being forced to shovel coal that Kate reveals her love for Pemberton. Her position as second-​in-​command on board the train forces her into submission, and at the end of the journey she assumes a more conventional, feminine role. However, she must relinquish her autonomy one final time before she is accepted back into respectable society. Having broken into Pemberton’s home and performed the role of his wife (divulging to his butler that she will buy a new tea set and take expensive holidays), Pemberton is irate that her explicit consumerism and mobility remain intact. He throws her out and she beats against the front door, begging to be let inside. Only when she has submitted to this final humiliation is she readmitted to the house, a now docile woman who is contained within a domestic space on her future husband’s terms. The final interwar film in the canon is The Lady Vanishes. The movie not only features topoi common to Hitchcock’s earlier train-​based pictures (Number Seventeen and The 39 Steps) but also The Wrecker, Seven Sinners and Kate Plus Ten. The film’s motifs include a woman spy (Miss Froy); women who are the cargo of the men (Miss Froy, the nun and Iris); and a narrative that resolves a female character’s heteronormativity.133 Throughout the movie, the authenticity of women’s mobility and vision –​and thus women’s abilities to participate in society –​are called into question. On the one hand, Miss Froy’s role as a spy is undermined when she does not see an informant’s murder, which takes place under her window –​literally under her nose. On the other, the train’s passengers doubt Iris’s vision after she is hit on the head and subsequently claims to have seen Miss Froy on the train, a fact that her fellow travellers deny. That Iris (whose name refers both to part of the eye and an optical, filmic device) is hit on the head, rather than the intended target, conflates looking with danger for women. As Gilbert tells Iris during the journey, 143

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From Steam to Screen she has the trait of ‘seeing things’ in common with his father, and so her sight is congruent with a masculine activity that is unnatural for women. In keeping with the trope, women in the film who do not see remain safe, while Iris’s capacity for observation condemns her to further attack. Owing to her seeing too much, Iris is positioned as a hysterical woman and her sight is dismissed as an interior, psychological trick, for the authority of looking belongs only to men, and what Iris sees is not to be believed. Iris’s head injury causes her vision to blur at the moment she crosses the threshold from platform to train, and as she leans from the carriage window to wave goodbye to her friends, her sight deteriorates. Her former companions’ images multiply and spiral around the screen, echoing the turning of the train’s wheels, and as the audience sees what Iris sees, it is drawn into her psychological space. The train then becomes a dream-​like site occupied by characters in Iris’s mind that may, or may not, be real, with the mirroring of her vision and the railway machinery merging both her mental space and the interior of the vehicle. In The Lady Vanishes, it is not only the woman who is transformed by a train journey, but also the train journey that is transformed by Iris, as the carriages are subject to her visions. Unlike earlier interwar films in the canon, viewers share the woman protagonist’s point of view: the film’s spectators see evidence of Miss Froy’s presence (her name written into the dirt on a dining carriage window), whereas the train’s passengers do not. However, the clue’s disappearance from the screen-​like surface undermines Iris’s story and simultaneously draws attention to the validity of the looking woman. It is only when Miss Froy’s tea packet appears to Gilbert on the window/​screen that her presence on the train is proved. Moreover, visual signifiers are necessary to verify that Miss Froy exists: without her inscribed name on the window, or the waste from her consumption, her identity is effaced (see Figure 3.3). The image-​less woman is the vanished woman, confirming women’s necessary function as objects, and the film self-​referentially alludes to the screen’s role in maintaining the status quo, as images representing Froy appear on the screen-​like windows. And within the train, men use women’s appearances and visions to limit the women characters’ movements. For example, Dr Hartz dresses Miss Froy in bandages to restrain her, diagnoses Iris’s visions as concussion 144

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Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman

Figure 3.3  Miss Froy writes her name on the window/screen to communi-

cate with Iris in The Lady Vanishes (Gainsborough Pictures, 1938).

to undermine her, and the magician in the luggage coach breaks Miss Froy’s glasses. Hence the onscreen train is a place where mobile women are immobilised, looking women become looked at, and the bourgeois Iris, travelling to London in order to marry for money, is transformed into a romantic that falls in love with a folk musician. As such her social mobility, as well as her physical traversal of space, is diminished. From Kate’s banishment from Pemberton’s home in Kate Plus Ten to Gilbert enforcing his unwanted presence in Iris’s hotel room in The Lady Vanishes, interwar railway films seldom represent female characters in public or private spaces over which women assert authority. Instead, women are sent and received between sites like men’s belongings. For example, Hannay promises Pamela in The 39 Steps that ‘I’ll see you’re sent back’ once he has finished using her, for she is a commodity that he initially assumes will become obsolete. Throughout the corpus, rail coaches offer modern women mobility and new perspectives, but deliver them into patriarchal control. Train travel in the films, therefore, represents the contradictory 145

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From Steam to Screen experiences of women in British culture, who negotiated public spaces simultaneously fraught with conservatism and transformation. The train, and by extension, the railway film, are sites that register women’s material experiences of modernity, for while the spaces are inclusive, they are also arenas in which men seek to control women’s interventions. Although women’s earnings increased their value to capitalist culture, and led state institutions to support their employment, the woman worker was contained within a hierarchical framework to appease existing male employees. The promise of improved mobility, expanded vision and new experiences offered by women’s work (and figuratively by the onscreen train) was limited by the narrow terms that set out the rules for women’s occupations.

Conclusion Onscreen train journeys from The Wrecker to The Lady Vanishes are all dangerous, or even fatal, for women travellers in the interwar period. Responding to women’s increasing, legislated presence in public, industrial space, and expansion of the enfranchised population, films simultaneously represented women characters as mobile and yet restricted by their inability to negotiate the modern world without men. For women protagonists, seeing too much is castigated (for example, Nora and Iris are attacked), while overt consumerism and working are also hazardous (for instance, Annabella and Fenton are targeted). Moreover, women throughout the corpus are objects sent on the railways by men and rendered immobile when they are delivered into marriage, and no women characters have authority over the sites they inhabit: men book hotel rooms and bedrooms on their behalf, and persist in invading their private space. From Mary to Iris, the films stop the women passengers in their tracks in order that the erring characters are restored to respectable and heteronormative society. The circumscribed nature of women’s inhabitation of the public sphere on screen was connected to their contested emergence into civic life during the 1920s and 1930s, as women’s roles in industrial spaces both reinforced and undermined their association with the private, domestic sphere. Judy Giles contends that ‘[d]‌omesticity, the home, housework and “private” life shaped the day-​to-​day experiences of most women’ in the first half of the 146

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Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman twentieth century.134 Domestic appliances were aimed at women, entrenching views that they were responsible for household work. Washing machines, vacuum cleaners and irons were thought to speed-​up chores and provide women with more free time. Yet electronic, domestic items did not liberate housewives, instead confining them more than ever to the space of the home.135 Moreover, even when women did gain employment, their labour was considered less valuable than men’s: while in 1931 the average wage for men was twenty-​seven pounds and thirty pence, for women the figure was twenty-​five pounds and seventy pence.136 Yet all the while women ‘constituted the basic market’ for mass-​produced commodities not only as purchasers, but also as workers.137 As such, mass-​production techniques and mass-​consumable goods enabled women to assume a crucial new role within Britain’s industries. Despite increases in women’s aural and visual representations on screen, negative attitudes towards women persisted in public discourses about gender. For example, author H G Wells published a damning assessment of women’s contributions to public life in the Daily Telegraph.138 He argued that in the thirteen years since the Sex Disqualification Removal Act women were still limited to ‘certain forms of work such as nursing, where there is authority without initiative’.139 Outstanding women had ‘not yet emerged’ and were not likely to equal men in fields such as politics. Wells also claimed that women in British society remained ‘decorative and ancillary’, and failed to acknowledge the patriarchal education system, marriage bar, unequal pay schemes and ideological barriers that prevented women from achieving success in parity with men. His argument not only suggested women’s subjugation was women’s fault, but also that they were superfluous to Britain’s economic success. Yet as Glucksmann demonstrates, women were crucial to the new manufacturing industries that sprang up in the interwar era.140 Just as middle-​class anxieties about mass consumption blurring traditional class hierarchies led them to undermine working-​class encounters with railway and film technologies, so too Britain’s institutionally patriarchal media challenged increasing gender equality by denigrating women passengers and spectators. However, rather than using comedy (for example, the stereotypical figure of the country bumpkin in train effect narratives), 147

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From Steam to Screen the daily press and film industry used fear to subvert women’s ambitions as participants in public space and commodity culture. Moreover, similar to the state-​sponsored films made during the First World War, fiction films about women workers and consumers in the interwar period served as propaganda that sought to keep women in their traditionally domestic place and maintain the status quo with regard to gender hierarchies. Conventional wisdom suggests that women’s visibility and acceptance in industrial environments improved during the Second World War, when women, as well as men, were conscripted for national service. As Penny Summerfield argues, though, there was continuity in working conditions for women between the interwar and wartime periods, as ‘women’s wartime access to “men’s work” was extremely limited.’141 Supporting her claim is evidence from the Ministry of Labour, which reported that there were just 6.5 per cent more women employed in Britain after the conflict than in 1935.142 Yet women were not the only group whose visibility and status within British culture was precarious in wartime, for in 1939, children’s roles as passengers and spectators became crucial to notions of national identity with the beginning of the evacuee programme.

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4 Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity in the Second World War

In 1941, an article in the Manchester Guardian described how Susan, a child participant in the government’s ‘Operation Pied Piper’ evacuation scheme, was faring in her new, countryside home. Susan was billeted in a village that she reportedly disliked and ran away from several times. When a bomb destroyed her family’s home in Manchester, Susan was stuck in the village, and, with nowhere else to go, she asked the local billeting officer to provide new accommodation. Eventually, the official consented to Susan’s request and accompanied the child to another billet while complaining about her troublesome behaviour. But, ‘Susan was not listening; she was watching the opening countryside with alarm,’ for the cottage to which she was moving was ‘on the outskirts, away from the village, the cinema, everything.’1 Although anecdotal, and written by an adult, the newspaper article reveals how significant mobility and sight in general, and the railway and cinema in particular, were to children as evacuees during the Second World War. The train is Susan’s escape route from the countryside to the city, and once the journey becomes unviable, the cinema is equated with ‘everything’ and comprises the child’s world. This chapter therefore explores the connections between the railway and cinema as both sights and sites through which children experienced urban space, and examines

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From Steam to Screen how the two technologies were implicated in constructing discourses about childhood in the city and countryside.2 I argue that, while young people were railway passengers and cinema spectators before the war, the evacuation programme transformed train travel and film viewing by reconfiguring the activities as essential to children’s experiences of modernity. Throughout the war, government and local councils struggled to persuade children and parents that evacuation was necessary in ensuring young people’s safety, as city-​dwelling children resisted leaving their families and the familiarity of the urban environment. Like Susan, many evacuees from Britain’s industrial towns and cities left their rural billets and returned home against official advice. As a result, the government, among other institutions, encouraged evacuees to eschew railway trips to potentially dangerous city spaces and instead take vicarious journeys via cinema. By setting up special film shows for evacuees, local authorities recognised that children could only be kept safe by maintaining children’s identities as mobile consumers and spectators in imagined, if not actual, urban environments. In doing so, the officials responsible for the evacuees’ cinema entertainments were both recreating, and returning the children to, the city. Yet, in literature both for and about children, the metropolis was traditionally depicted as an unsafe space for young people to inhabit, and, owing to the risk of aerial bombardment or invasion, the perceived risks associated with children living in towns and cities only increased when war commenced. The authorities therefore positioned modernity as simultaneously crucial and threatening to children’s safety. Furthermore, media from films to novels, and the daily press to radio broadcasts, configured childhood through a series of binaries that included the urban and rural, light and dark, visibility and invisibility, and movement and stasis, all of which oscillated between benign and malevolent influences in a child’s life. That childhood was subject to so many fluctuating forces alludes to anxieties in British culture about mechanisation and conflict (an attitude explored in Chapter Two with regard to the First World War), in which the child is a metaphor for the nation under siege. In examining representations of children in cinema, scholars including Karen Lury, Vicky Lebeau, and Emma Wilson all situate the child in 150

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Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity narratives about loss, nostalgia and suffering.3 Indeed, Lury contends that the child’s image enables filmmakers and audiences to ‘reflect on what cannot be said’ about traumatic subjects such as war.4 That is not to suggest that the child’s meaning on screen is fixed, for as Claudia Castaneda argues, the child represents adult fears, which are culturally specific and evolving.5 In the specific context of British media in the Second World War, the child signified the nation’s future. Nevertheless, the child’s safety was not just a figurative concern in film or literature, but also a literal one in actual towns and cities where the children that represented Britain’s prospects were at risk from enemy violence. Thus, while I acknowledge the discursive nature of the child’s onscreen image in constructing narratives about the nation’s modernity, I depart from previous scholarship in focusing on the actual, lived experiences of evacuee children during the war and how they encountered urban consumer culture. The available materials written by children about their experiences on railways or in cinemas are, as is often the case with marginalised or peripheral demographics, limited. Consequently, aside from a small corpus of children’s wartime diaries, the chapter draws on memoirs about childhood written by adults, as well as news items about children, and films, magazines, and literature aimed at child audiences. In using a diverse selection of sources, I explore how the child was simultaneously isolated from, and enmeshed in, the practices of motion, spectatorship and consumption that permeated the adult world. As a result, British media cast the child both as a natural, innocent bystander, as well as a willing participant in capitalist society. I interrogate contradictory narratives about children in modernity by first elucidating the cultural significance of the city and countryside, and associated imagery of light and dark, in discourses about childhood. Tracing the perceived dangers of urban space and electricity back to nineteenth-​century transformations to child labour practices, the first part of the chapter situates the active child consumer in a passive world created and represented to children by adults. In the second and third parts, the chapter investigates the histories of child passengers and spectators by looking at media depictions of child evacuees as rail tourists, and at cinemagoing’s importance as a ‘second home’ for displaced children. I  propose that the movie theatre replaced the train as a conduit for urban travel 151

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From Steam to Screen in rural environments, and so enabled children to maintain a tangential route ‘home’ to the metropolis. Finally, I  investigate the revival of more primitive, amateur exhibition practices, which transported child viewers between past and present temporalities. In doing so, I  demonstrate that cinema was crucial in shaping evacuees’ encounters with space and time in Britain during the war.

The (in)Visible Child in Urban and Rural Spaces In exploring the evacuee child’s experiences of technology, travel and spectatorship in the Second World War, it is helpful to consider the cultural significance of the city (from where the child was evacuated) and the countryside (the child’s destination) in British culture. As Jenny Bavidge’s work on children in cinema proposes, ‘[t]‌he clash of an idealised pastoral world of childhood with the stratifications and miseries of urban life is a standard theme in […] children’s literature and film.’6 Consequently, the railway and cinema, which enable actual and vicarious journeys both through and between city and countryside spaces, are intertwined in narratives about the urban and rural in childhood. Traditionally, cities and towns are recognised in British media as comprising the architectures (such as factories, cinemas, and department stores) and infrastructures (including railway hubs and road networks) that emerged from and perpetuated modernity. Densely populated urban areas provided both the space and potential consumer base for mass consumption, leading to what Janet Ward describes in the context of Weimar Germany as ‘surface culture’, which was the popularisation of visual communication, such as advertising and film, over the material.7 In Britain, as in Germany, neon signs and billboards transformed the interfaces through which people encountered cities and towns. Consequently, urban space relied first on glass buildings, and later on gas and electric, to illuminate interiors and images independently of natural light.8 From the 1880s onward, there was what Richard Dennis calls a ‘proliferation of electric signs and giant advertisements’ that populated London.9 Hence British media from the late nineteenth century, up to the outbreak of war in 1939, associated the urban with light, and the rural, inversely, with dark. The binary posed by the city and countryside was a 152

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Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity recurrent theme not only in representations of evacuees, but also in films and literature that more broadly addressed notions of childhood. Children have always inhabited towns and cities alongside adults. In the first half of the nineteenth century, children occupied, traded in, and moved independently through the streets; and owing to the high proportion of the British population aged under fifteen (estimated to be 30–​40  per cent), children were highly visible in urban environments.10 Moreover, young people worked alongside adults in the factories, mills and mines made possible by Britain’s steam-​powered revolution. However, by the 1860s, working conditions came under scrutiny from a range of parties (including unions, politicians and philanthropists) who especially decried the poor health and education afforded child labourers. Under mounting pressure for reform, the government legislated to improve living conditions and opportunities for children, and so passed the Education Reform Act in 1880, which made schoolgoing compulsory until age ten and ostensibly removed young people from the industrial sphere. That is not to suggest that the reforms eradicated child labour. A journalist writing for Girls’ Own Paper, a periodical aimed at young, likely unmarried, women in 1939, noted that while ‘[c]‌hildren under fourteen are now forbidden by law to work in factories and shops,’ readers would find ‘many girls of your own age learning dressmaking or millinery or doing some mechanical process in the production of matches, biscuits and buttons and so forth’ above shops across Britain.11 No doubt conditions for child workers improved over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, the stigma associated with employing children led to the practice being hidden within the urban environment, where it took place above retail spaces and behind closed doors unless exposed by a reporter. With improving infant mortality rates and greater emphasis placed on child psychology and schooling, the child in British culture became associated with the private, domestic realm of the home. Subsequently, like the women subjects of Chapter Three, children’s encounters with urban environments were regulated and restricted, both in terms of their material interactions with, and representations in, public space. But whereas patriarchal authorisation predicated women’s participation in the visible arenas of the metropolis, the (if no less male-​oriented) authority of the adult, or 153

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From Steam to Screen parent, traditionally governed children’s presences in streets, parks, and cinemas. Despite the relative safety offered by adult supervision, films and literature suggested that children in industrialised environments warranted fear; full of strangers and speeding traffic, the streets presented a threat to the young person’s security. In her work on children in onscreen cities, Bavidge proposes that urban space represents ‘a lack of connection to natural objects’ that is ‘damaging to children’s moral and physical well-​being’.12 Popular media both about and for children in the 1930s articulate adult anxieties about the city’s affect on the young. For example, in Sabotage (1936), a little boy charged with delivering a film to a London cinema is killed when, in a now infamous sequence, the canister (which secretly contains a bomb) blows up the bus on which he is travelling.13 The boy is not only a victim of the terrorist scheme that implicates him in carrying an explosive, but also of the urban environments through which he moves. The film invites a series of alternative ‘what if ’ scenarios that are congruent with the explicit violence of the bombing: if only the boy did not live and work at a cinema; if only he had not taken the bus; if only he did not inhabit the city, he might be alive. Children, too, were taught to suspect spaces of modernity and recognise their vulnerability within them. In a Girls’ Own Paper story, the girl protagonist, Bennie, saw that the ‘old town’ was ‘deserted and quite dark.’ Meanwhile, the ‘modern was still awake, as she saw by a glare in the night sky […] Neon signs and shop window lights, street lamps and lighted windows, made the night gay’. But despite the brilliance of the ‘new town’ lights, Bennie avoids the district for she is wise enough to be ‘afraid of the traffic.’14 Moreover, the city is a place where modernity goes wrong: for other girl characters, stations are ‘gloomy’, lifts break down and girls live in poverty desperate for jobs.15 In another story, a seemingly innocent Christmas party results in children being injured when the host’s ‘streamlined’ and ‘ultra-​modern’ robotic orchestra breaks down. The child narrator surmises that ‘[m]‌echanisation is alright in some things, but when it’s applied to a Christmas party in all its branches, you reach the giddy limit.’16 Like Bennie, the young people that avoid harm in the story are astute enough to recognise the dangers inherent in industrialised society. 154

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Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity During the war, both adults and children imbued the technologies and spaces that represented modernity, including artificial light and urban areas, with even greater significance in narratives about risk to young life. While city lights evoked excitement and glamour (for Bennie, the lighted windows ‘make the night gay’), the nighttime illuminations simultaneously offered possibilities for immorality, such as theft and other crime, in crowded areas.17 In wartime in particular, artificial light gained new meaning in popular culture, as aerial bombardments lit up the night sky across Britain’s major industrial cities and towns. Sylvia Hadley, a child evacuee in a village near Birmingham, witnessed ‘gunfire like a macabre firework display’, with ‘searchlights piercing the darkness, shining up to the stars, lighting up little bombers in the night sky, turning into a thing of beauty’. Yet, she noted, the spectacle was ‘bringing death and destruction’.18 From the village, Sylvia enjoyed the light show that the war provided without fearing for her safety; however, she recognised that her remoteness from the city (the lights are ‘in the distance’) was crucial in protecting her from harm. Indeed, government rhetoric about artificial light suggested that for enemy aircraft flying overhead, the proliferation of light on the ground provided a map of the nation’s industrial hubs and enabled pilots to identify targets for bombing. To counter the problem, the government imposed a countrywide ‘blackout’, which plunged all of Britain into darkness, with no street lamps, car headlights or other exterior light sources permitted after nightfall. But, typically in terms of modernity’s capacity for enabling simultaneity, urban space became doubly threatening when, to combat the perils posed by light, the city became artificially dark. Tasks usually performed under street lamps or floodlights became suddenly dangerous: on the railways, the blackout ‘increases the difficulty of the work and when an air-​raid warning is anticipated only one light glimmers over the switchboard.’19 And, as reports from the village of Bletchley suggested in 1939, the enforced darkness was responsible for crashes and other accidents.20 For children, the blackout had various connotations, ranging from the mildly irritating (the legislation ‘put a temporary stop to the letting off of whizz-​bangs and Catherine wheels on Guy Fawkes Day’) to the more severe.21 In a story in the Modern Boys’ Annual, the ‘blackness’ of the railway 155

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From Steam to Screen line at night endangers the child sleuth, Joe, who uncovers a plot to destroy an express train. With no light to illuminate his descent down a steep bank, he goes about a ‘nightmare journey’ in ‘[p]‌itch darkness’.22 Moreover, Walter Elliot, Minister of Health, used the blackout as a means to persuade children to join the evacuation scheme, or else remain at their billets, telling the young population not to ‘think it’s alright because nothing has happened yet’. He described how the ‘darkened streets and shut-​down cinemas are daily and nightly reminders of what still hangs over us.’23 However, in opposition to the hazardous city, where light signalled aerial bombardments and darkness caused accidents, the countryside was a safe space for children’s habitation. Similarly to women in British culture up to 1939, children’s visibility in the public sphere during the war made them vulnerable to attack. Hence, young people’s safety was only guaranteed if, as one evacuee wrote in her memoir, the nation’s children were ‘disappeared from sight.’24 While people feared that urban blackouts endangered the population, the countryside’s nighttime blackness was reassuring in its naturalness. Thus the evacuee scheme literally arranged for children to be kept in the dark so as to render the child invisible in the public realm. Whereas urban spaces evoked anxiety about children, the countryside was a secure environment in which the child could move through and observe the natural world without fear. Owain Jones suggests that, in British culture, ‘[m]‌odern notions of childhood’ had ‘nature at their core. Inevitably, then, notions of childhood and the rural were in harmony.’25 The agrarian landscape, traditionally associated with darkness in comparison to the illuminated city, was also a place of colour, where the child might see organic autumn ‘tints’, and beauty of the ‘flaming gold’ leaves rather than artificial billboards and neon signs.26 The British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) policies regarding children’s programming foregrounded the relationship between young people and the natural environment in radio shows such as the Children’s Hour feature ‘Out with Romany’, which recreated rural space using sound effects and encouraged children to go on rambles and look at wildlife.27 According to Simon Flynn, the BBC propagated the idea of the child ‘in nature and the child as natural.’28 The government and local authorities also espoused the organic connections between children and pastoral environments in rhetoric that suggested the countryside was good 156

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Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity for the child’s health. For example, Lord De La Warr, President of the Board of Education, assessed that evacuees ‘certainly looked twice as well’ than their peers in Britain’s cities, for whom ‘there are only the streets and the cinema’.29 He concluded that any young people who remained in urban areas risked growing up as ‘barbarians’. His statement, designed to generate support for the national evacuation scheme, not only cast the rural as a healthier environment than the urban, but also implied that pastimes such as cinemagoing had a negative impact on young people’s development. Thus in the countryside, children were ostensibly outside mass consumption’s interventions in daily life and so were (according to De La Warr’s logic) better prepared for citizenship in British society. The child rambler moved and looked freely, unhindered by either the regulated street systems that confined the city flâneur, or the directed gaze that characterised cinema and advertising spectatorship. In part, the pastoral landscape enabled the child’s liberty because, contrary to the city’s crowded streets and densely populated housing, rural areas were spacious. Child evacuees in the public imagination had access to undeveloped land, fields, and woodland. The national media perceived the countryside as so enormous that there no concerns about overcrowding due to the enormous influx of city dwellers (with 216,000 people moving to Wales from Manchester and Liverpool alone) –​although some local presses addressed the issue.30 The widespread cultural assumption of agrarian wealth, which was exacerbated during the war by the evacuee scheme, the Land Army’s work, and the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign, suggests that the population’s reliance on the land countered, or even transcended, industrialisation. However, the notion of ‘limitless space’ reinforced, rather than challenged, impulses in modernity to conceive of the world in terms of abundance.31 And, while people could access rural spaces via public footpaths, agricultural land in particular (which was used to generate produce for mass consumption), and the countryside in general, comprised private properties beset with hedges, fences and gates. In Girls’ Own Paper, London evacuee Phyllis is horrified to learn that the villagers nearby her billet live on land, and in homes, owned by a local squire, who controls the tenants’ access to water and electricity systems.32 The story, which is sympathetic to the benevolent lord, nevertheless exposes 157

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From Steam to Screen the myth of the evacuees’ freedom to roam around their pastoral, wartime environments, because rambling was potentially restricted by the threat of trespassing on other people’s land. So while natural surroundings kept children safe from the literal danger of war in urban areas, the countryside did not protect evacuees from the imagined threat posed by modernity in De La Warr’s speech. Britain’s agricultural and rural spaces –​which were embedded in, rather than distinct from, capitalist networks of commoditisation –​offered children a secure environment in which to ramble and observe. But rambling and observing, equivalent to moving and looking, were essential skills for children to learn as future consumers. Lebeau traces the adult consumption of the figurative child back to the nineteenth-​century, Victorian craze for collecting photographic portraits of children.33 Furthermore, Hugh Cunningham proposes that, in the twentieth century, adults viewed children as ‘assets’ of civilization that should be ‘valued accordingly’ and protected from dangerous, outside influences.34 As representatives of Britain’s future prosperity, children were ‘seen as the most valuable asset a nation had’.35 Consequently, wartime writers recognised young people’s status as commodities in literature aimed at child readers. For instance, in Girls’ Own Paper, Stuart Robinson described how alongside museum artefacts, ‘Edinburgh was sending its most precious treasures –​its children –​away also, into safety.’36 Similarly, The Times reported that in addition to evacuees, trains were transporting valuable cargoes of meat, butter and tea away from cities for safekeeping.37 The child’s conflation with goods from works of art to foodstuffs implied that the young body was just another example of national produce. As well as being commoditised, children were also potentially, or actually, consumers. Young people’s Second World War diaries frequently refer to visiting retail spaces (often local shops), where they would spend money on sweets, or else run errands and pick up groceries for their foster families. Popular magazines, too, acknowledged children’s agency in travelling to retail sites, selecting items according to personal tastes, and making purchases. For example, the fictional Peggy needs to buy a new tennis dress. She visits a local department store with a friend, and together they admire ‘the rainbow masses of silks, the fragile stockings which they both 158

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Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity longed to wear’ and gaze ‘with pleasure at the heavily embroidered evening shawls’.38 Even though Peggy does not have the funds to acquire goods such as silk stockings, which belong to an adult world of attainment, she actively participates in consumer culture by looking at, and aspiring to buy, the goods on offer. And it was not only the advertisement of luxury items that tempted children into spending money. The countryside itself was packaged and sold in cities to children who missed the rural surroundings of their boarding schools during the holidays. At Covent Garden Market in London, children could visit ‘stalls where you can buy moss and smell again the sweet damp smell of the woods, and in the autumn there are bunched branches bright with berries from the country hedgerows’.39 Just as adults were mass consumers, so, too, were children –​albeit on a comparatively smaller economic scale. At the BBC, an organisation that broadcast programmes reinforcing the connections between children and the natural world, young people were simultaneously perceived as future licence-​fee buyers.40 And, making explicit the child’s potential for generating revenue, critic Dorothy Richardson wrote in Close Up that children made ‘the best of advertising agents’, and in claiming that ‘[a]‌ll over the world this young audience is waiting in its millions’, she described a mass audience for filmmakers to exploit.41 Media consumption, especially pertaining to cinema, was commonplace in children’s daily lives on an international scale. As Ian Wojcik-​Andrews argues, children’s cinemagoing was so crucial to national economies that official government bodies in the USA avoided implementing censorship for fear of affecting box-​office revenue.42 Indeed, children’s film cultures both inside and outside of the cinema were pervasive in Britain. For example, up to the 1930s, young people purchased hand-​cranked projectors from toy shops, alongside short films, which enabled them to partake in film culture and, in some cases, generate revenue from putting on amateur screenings.43 In cinemas, while waiting for shows to begin, children consumed food such as nuts and oranges, and read the comics and magazines they had purchased, which contained advertisements for sweets and toys.44 Then, outside the movie theatre, children ‘constituted a market of some significant purchasing power’, which contributed to Disney selling $10million of merchandise in 1933.45 In addition to 159

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From Steam to Screen official, branded film memorabilia, a child could also collect postcards and cigarette cards featuring stars’ caricatures, buy fan magazines and, from the 1940s, sign up to national cinema clubs.46 Consequently, children at the outbreak of the Second World War participated in leisure activities predicated on consumption (including broadcast, print and film media, as well as retail), spectacle (such as advertising and cinema), and, for those that made journeys as tourists in the holidays, travel.

Child Evacuees as Railway Tourists At the war’s outbreak, the government recommended that children aged over five should evacuate industrial areas with their schoolmates and teachers, whereas children aged under five were accompanied by their mothers. Not all children were evacuated, or, indeed, treated as equals: under fives whose mothers remained in work in cities were not evacuated, and there was a ‘special reluctance’ to accept children of colour in billets unaccompanied by a parent.47 Consequently, despite protests from newspaper columnists and social workers, many young people remained in Britain’s cities. However, for white children aged five or older, news media, including the daily press and newsreels, framed the wartime evacuation scheme as a leisure activity, or vacation, that offered an escape from the metropolis. The plan’s national scope told a story about abundance that emphasised the British railways’ ability to deliver children to safety on a massive scale, and reports about evacuation foregrounded the vast numbers of children and trains involved in the scheme. Thus 100,000 volunteers, including ‘school teachers, transport organizers, railway companies, health organizations and volunteer helpers’, visited 5 million households to compile billeting lists, which comprised 3 million people in total.48 On September 1, 1939, the first day of evacuation, children left London at a rate of 8,000 per hour.49 As the war progressed (with further major evacuation schemes taking place in June 1940, and again in 1944), 607,635 children and accompanying adults moved from London boroughs to safer, rural areas.50 Owing to the enormous figures cited, the daily press suggested that the scheme was unprecedented in British history and a victory for both the nation’s 160

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Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity government and transport systems. As such, news outlets represented evacuation as having continuity with existing railway practices. By situating evacuees in narratives about tourism and pleasure, print and onscreen media reassured parents and children that the journey away from home was similar to school trips or holidays that used the rail network. Furthermore, drawing on the train’s capacity to mediate experiences of both urban and rural environments, the railway in literature and film bridged the gap between evacuee children’s encounters with the city and countryside. Describing the rail journey’s impact on passengers’ perceptions of the world, Wolfgang Schivelbusch proposes that travellers saw landscapes ‘through’ the train, rather than distinct from the vehicle.51 His argument implies that windows, which typically exposed coaches to light and the exterior surroundings, enabled people to experience the outside while inside the carriage. The passenger’s concurrent encounter with interior and exterior spaces is represented in Eric Ravilious’s watercolour Train Landscape, in which a carriage window mediates green fields and hills.52 Through the coach’s glass architecture, the viewer, positioned inside the domestic setting of the train looking out, experiences a flattening of two distinct spaces into one. The painting’s title further accentuates a connection between the locomotive and the agrarian world that the railway passes through; the work depicts a congruent ‘train landscape’, as opposed to a train in a landscape. Contemporary literature also suggested that the railway coincided with nature: the train in Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train emits sparks that are like ‘hordes of scarlet beetles’ and he describes the express ‘hooting’ like a bird as it pulls away from the station.53 Moreover, when the rail network passed through unbuilt, rural space between cities, towns and villages, the view from the moving train window collapsed natural and industrial spectacles into a continuous stream of images. As discussed in Chapter One, both Schivelbusch and Stephen Kern assert that, in connecting urban and pastoral locations, the railway destroyed the localised identities of isolated, rural communities.54 However, owing to the train’s ability to link otherwise disparate spaces, passengers could fluidly negotiate the city and countryside with ease. For example, in a wartime children’s story, the young protagonists travel from their remote boarding school to London by 161

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From Steam to Screen train. The railway journey breaks down the boundaries between rural and metropolitan space, so the children manage to traverse the crowded station because the city ‘wilderness’ is indistinguishable from the landscape they left behind.55 Thus, through eliding urban and pastoral views, the train presented the beginning and end of the rail journey as continuous, which might have allayed anxieties for evacuee children concerned about proximity to their parents and city life. The train remained a vital connection between built-​up and rural areas for child evacuees. However, throughout the war, the rail network was subject to bomb damage, station closures (especially during the Blitz) and major rescheduling.56 So while media configured the railway journey as circular, young people’s safety was only ensured if children moved away from, rather than towards, the metropolis. Like adults suffering the excesses of modernity (such as the nineteenth-​century condition ‘railway spine’, or First World War ‘neurasthenia’), children that remained in the wartime city might experience fatigue.57 Urban areas were chaotic sites, and so the child’s railway escape to the countryside represented relief. One girl described her self-​imposed evacuation from London as resulting from exhaustion at the nightly sirens and trips to the air-​raid shelter rather than the actual threat imposed by ‘silly buzz bombs’. She recalled how ‘sinking down beside my suitcase, under the glass of Paddington Station,’ a ‘flying bomb “cut out” overhead and began its slow gliding descent.’ However, she was not afraid but ‘said to myself “not yet –​not til I’ve had a break.”’58 For the child, the city was too crowded, too active and altogether too much. Hence London in wartime represented what Kern calls a pervasive ‘energy crisis […] of abundance’.59 Nevertheless, while evacuation offered children respite from the chaotic metropolis, the railways on which young people travelled were also subject to the capitalist impulse to increase pace and scale. When the Daily Mail reported that the evacuation scheme was being ‘speeded up’, the paper commented that ‘[i]‌t should be still further accelerated.’60 In addition, increases in wartime travel led to trains pulling up at stations twice to despatch passengers from a greater number of carriages.61 Consequently, the evacuees’ railway journeys were an extension of the over-​abundant urban experience.

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Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity Of course, the train, segregated into third and first, and used more or less frequently by people from different classes, had varying significance for children depending on their background. Furthermore, boys’ and girls’ literature framed the railway in gendered narratives that coded interest in trains as masculine. Boys’ magazines featured articles about the world’s notable locomotives; railway technical specifications; the work of the British armed forces to create and maintain rail networks in wartime; and advances in train technology.62 Numerous Meccano and Hornby advertisements encouraged boys to consume rail-​related artefacts, and take up related hobbies, such as train modelling.63 One enthusiast detailed the spectacles on offer to young male viewers at train stations, and on enquiring about the schedule at ticket offices, boys could attend weekly buffer tests.64 In addition to providing leisure activities, the railway was an aspirational space where boys felt ‘envy’ of adult controllers, had ambitions as engine drivers, and convinced signalmen to take on apprentices.65 For girls, articles and stories about travel tended to focus on flight rather than rail transport, which was perhaps because of the aeroplane’s more glamorous connotations and less cumbersome mechanisation.66 Whatever the causes, there were gendered disparities between children’s consumption of, and participation in, railway cultures. However, where boys’ and girls’ experiences of train travel intersected was as tourists, which was a common theme in print and film discourses about evacuation. As adult leisure time increased in the late nineteenth century, summer breaks became commonplace, and railways transported city dwellers to coastal resorts where holidaymakers could ‘take the air’.67 During the school holidays, children would accompany their parents on train journeys, and so young people were accustomed to leaving home and travelling on the rail network as sightseers.68 As well as configuring train rides as connections between urban and rural spaces, British media emphasised the railway’s role in tourist activities as propaganda in support of the evacuation scheme. Consequently, a newsreader describes the children who appear on screen in Evacuees –​Children Go Happily (1939) as departing ‘cheerfully enough’ with ‘no terrors’ because their trip was ‘regarded as just another holiday’ (see Figure 4.1).69 Despite the voiceover’s assertions, and, indeed,

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Figure 4.1  A child eats her packed lunch – apparently enjoying a holiday-

like trip – on an evacuee train in the British Movietone newsreel item Children Go Happily (1939).

the title’s positive rhetoric, the children in the film likely had no agency in how their journeys were represented for, or by, adults.70 Accompanying shots depict children eating chocolate, smiling, and even waving at the camera from carriage windows, as the young passengers are ‘entrained for their excitingly unknown destinations’.71 However, subsequent interior shots that reveal the children’s activities on the trip –​watching scenery pass by the carriage, eating packed lunches, and sitting with their faces obscured by large newspapers –​cast the young travellers as adults capable of undertaking independent journeys. The story’s comedic subversion when the newspaper is realised as a children’s comic also serves to undercut the narrator’s brief allusion to the disruption of daily routine. The newsreel item implies that children primed as consumers were well trained to cope with the upheaval of evacuation. Similar iconography is evident in Children Re-​evacuated (1940), in which child-​adults proliferate the screen, with boys carrying hard hats, 164

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Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity scouts blending into crowds of uniformed officers, and girls carrying and caring for dolls.72 Another British Pathé item, On the Home Front (1940) also made explicit references to tourism.73 Smiling school children carry their luggage along a station platform and hand out bottles of drink as they head on a holiday-​like trip to southeast Wales. The narrator informs viewers that while the children ‘leave heavy hearts behind’ the young people ‘think it’s grand to spend another day in the train.’ Adult narratives about evacuation, therefore, countered parents’ anxieties about separation by focusing on children’s alleged excitement. The negative effects of separation, unfamiliarity and foster care on children are traced in interviews and psychological reports that undermine narratives about holidaymaking and the evacuees’ enthusiasm for their journeys. However, writers in diaries and memoirs suggest that there was initially excitement among the children about leaving home, which implies that newsreels exaggerated rather than falsified the story for propaganda. For instance, Leslie McDermott Brown, a thirteen-​year-​ old Scottish evacuee who left Glasgow in 1939, emphasised the camaraderie among his peers as the children departed the city together as if on a school trip.74 At the station, he met ‘many friends all with their gas masks and tallies round their necks.’ On the train, there were ‘sixteen bawling kids’ in each compartment. With seating designed to accommodate eight passengers, the space was overcrowded, yet McDermott Brown does not mention experiencing discomfort. Instead, he describes the young passengers playing music and having fun: ‘Drew played a clarinet. I struggled with a ukulele […] what with our combined efforts and various young voices we had one hell of a time’. Adding to the children’s enjoyment was the realisation that their destination was a holiday resort, Troon. In an adult account of the 1939 evacuation, Mrs M Dineen, a volunteer looking after children leaving London, recorded in her diary that, on departure for Sussex, most young passengers ‘were very excited’ and left with ‘shouts and cheers’.75 On a later, far longer journey to Wales when the children were re-​evacuated, the adults organised ‘games and fun’ for the train and attempted to frame the journey as a holiday, rather than a wartime necessity. Dineen’s photograph albums, which feature pictures of her charges both outside their billets and among local Welsh landscapes, 165

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From Steam to Screen underscore her interpreting evacuation as a vacation and engagement in practices (such as using a camera) associated with holidaymaking. But while children and adults depicted evacuation as an adventure at the point of departure, the excitement did not necessarily last the duration of the train ride. Joyce Ward was so underwhelmed by her experience that in her memoir all she recalled about the journey was a vague concern about whether her sandwiches would last the trip.76 McDermott Brown and his companions also acknowledged the mundane aspects of evacuation. Alluding to the anxieties facing evacuees about travelling to unknown destinations and being separated into different foster families, the children ‘decided there and then to try to stick together when we got where we were going’.77 Moreover, the glamour promised by the holiday resort came to nothing, as ‘[i]‌t was September and the holiday season was over.’78 Then again, for evacuee Bryan Breed, the distance between London and his foster home in the rural Norfolk was more overwhelming. On being told by a billeting officer not to worry about bombs in their location, which was over one hundred miles from the capital, Breed recalls thinking that ‘it was not the bombs that worried us […] It was the hundred miles.’79 Far from offering young people what The Times described as the ‘real excitements of evacuation’, pastoral locations were dull compared to the built-​up districts that the children left behind.80 Countryside rail stations did not suffer the same threat of aerial bombardment that Bennie encountered at Paddington in London.81 Instead, a children’s story depicting a rural station described a ‘rickety’ and ‘uneven’ platform that featured nothing except ‘a bench of faded green wood, an empty chocolate machine and a dilapidated weather-​beaten sign’.82 The unfilled vending machine, which is void of products and unable to serve customers, epitomises the evacuees’ transition between the city’s bustling spectacle and the comparatively barren agrarian landscape. Thus child evacuees faced not only separation from their families and metropolitan homes, but also boredom, which government and local authorities had to combat to prevent children making return journeys to familiar, yet more dangerous, urban areas.

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The Movie House and Making a ‘Home From Home’ Life for evacuees arriving in rural areas was characterised in British media as lonely and alienating, which eventually resulted in both government and civilian warnings about children returning to cities, and the cinema’s popularisation as a means of encouraging young people to remain at their billets. Writing in Girls’ Own Paper, Stuart Robertson commented on the popularisation of the word ‘evacuee’, explaining that it was ‘a queer-​looking word, not to be found in any dictionary.’83 His suggestion that ‘evacuee’ was not officially categorised in the English language alludes to the liminal position that evacuee children occupied in rural towns and villages. As symbols of the nation’s future, uprooted young people were both central to public discourses about the war and marginalised by their distance from the action. Foster carers stood in for families, but as the Manchester Guardian’s fictional Susan, or the young people moved from Brighton to Wales in Children Re-​evacuated demonstrate, billets were transitory and did not offer stability.84 And while the children’s stay in the countryside was ostensibly temporary, evacuation also implied permanence, as the conflict’s increasing longevity meant children did not know when they could return home. One commentator attempted to explain the impact that uncertainty and dislocation had on evacuees who left the familiarity of the city: Behind many of the complaints of naughtiness by evacuee children there lies the tragedy of complete lack of understanding. The city-​bred child suddenly planted in the country misses so much that to which he has been accustomed all his life –​from tinned milk to shop windows, street stalls and cinemas. To him trees and fields and hedges all seem alike, and to find that primroses and blackberries are to be had for the picking, while to take roses and apples without leave is a crime, must be puzzling to a juvenile mind. Moreover, there is always lurking in the background the feeling of insecurity. Any day, any hour, any minute, the child feels, he may be on the move.85

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From Steam to Screen The article encouraged adult readers to empathise with evacuated children out of place in a wartime culture that undermined the usually highly valued notion of continuity in childhood development. The alien status of the evacuee was humorously depicted in the Daily Mail’s ‘Nipper’ cartoons, which followed the adventures of a roughly three-​ year-​old child and baby sibling. The stories depict the awkward evacuee as a penguin –​complete with gas mask –​that causes chaos on arrival at the Nipper family home.86 In the cartoons, Nipper repeatedly tries, and fails, to accommodate the penguin’s needs –​for example, by providing first a doghouse, and then a cage, for the bird to inhabit. After a series of mishaps, the frustrated penguin meets with other evacuated birds to complain about the misunderstandings that prevent their integration into the adoptive community and, without warning, disappears from future cartoons.87 The story implies that without proper plans to make evacuees feel at home in their billets, the children will travel back to urban areas. Only two weeks into the war, letter writers to The Times voiced their concerns about the evacuation scheme’s long-​term success. ‘When the novelty of living in the country or unusual surroundings have worn off,’ one letter argued, ‘the evacuated children will have little chance of entertainment beyond an occasional visit to the cinema.’88 Reports in the daily press indicate that fears about children leaving their billets were not without foundation. By September 13, 1939 (thirteen days after the operation began) approximately 80 per cent of evacuees sent to Cupar, Scotland had returned to Edinburgh.89 And in October 1939, reports suggested that 7,000 of the 17,806 Glasgow evacuees who arrived in Perthshire had travelled back to the city.90 Consequently, national and local authorities had to find incentives for children to remain in designated safe areas. Hence magazines included advice about country living, for example in the Modern Boys’ Annual, in which one article asked readers to ‘make things pleasant’ for evacuees because they ‘are a jolly lot on the whole, but naturally feeling a bit lonely and strange’.91 Children in rural districts were also encouraged to invite evacuees to join in games and dog walks.92 In addition, there were also stories about the perils of returning to the wartime city –​and cinema, which in some cases was interwoven in narratives about the perils of urban life. In ‘Sonia’s Stolen Days’, the eponymous 168

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Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity protagonist stays in London without her parents owing to confusion about her school term dates.93 At first, Sonia relishes her freedom: ‘[a]‌lone and for the first time in her life’ she participates in adult modes of consumption by independently dining in a café and booking a hotel room. Next, she ‘sauntered up the Strand to the Tivoli, where there was a film she wanted to see. She saw the film, which she thoroughly enjoyed.’ However, after visiting the cinema, ‘she had her first setback –​the black out! It had been light when she entered the theatre; now it was dark; and she missed the familiar lights.’94 With no illuminations to guide her, Sonia gets lost in the once-​ recognisable streets and has her bag stolen in the nighttime gloom. The tale cautions young people to maintain their safety by resisting the lure of the city, and its picture palaces. The cinema was further implicated in discourses about danger by way of the pro-​evacuation propaganda that appeared on screen, which ranged from implicit support in fiction films, such as Confirm or Deny (1941), to explicit ministerial speeches in newsreels.95 Confirm or Deny, a Hollywood picture produced by Fox, reinforced arguments for children’s evacuation from industrial districts in Britain targeted by the Luftwaffe. The film featured British child star Roddy McDowall, who was represented in Hollywood fan literature as a wartime refugee who had escaped the threat of bombs by moving to the USA.96 McDowall played Albert, a young boy employed by a newspaper office to sit on the roof and keep watch for a carrier pigeon due to bring news of a German invasion. With no reference throughout the film to his parents, or rationale for his being in London rather than safely in the countryside with his peers, Albert eventually dies alone while on lookout duties. As he calls Mr Mitchell to relay the final code brought by the pigeon, the sounds of aerial bombardment increase and drown out Albert’s voice as incendiary bombs fall like rain around him. The pathos of the child stranded and killed amid the violence of adult war, dressed inadequately in a tin hat and with no friend save his dog, reminded viewers that the city offered children a fate worse than loneliness in the countryside. A similar narrative underpinned government efforts to convince parents in urban areas to evacuate their children. In Evacuation Difficulties (1940), Walter Elliot, the Minister for Health, visits evacuees in rural 169

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From Steam to Screen Scotland.97 He interviews the young people about their experiences and gains assurances that they have now seen snowdrops and daffodils. Elliot then asks the children where they resided in London. As they reply ‘Stepney’, the film cuts to a long, lingering shot of a back alley behind a building that evokes the Victorian slum, where there is nothing but brick and concrete and densely populated housing. The contrast between the wide, open spaces that the children inhabit at their billets, and the drab confines of their urban homes, perpetuates the dichotomy between the natural, safe countryside, and the artificial, hazardous metropolis. In doing so, the film inverts narratives about the pastoral landscape as boring and the city as exciting, for the countryside is brimming with spectacle and the mundane Stepney street is void of the movie theatres and advertising displays associated with urban life. However, the cinema also played a significant role in keeping children safe. To relieve the evacuees’ tedium in rural areas, various authorities set up film shows that vicariously, rather than literally, transported young viewers to exciting locations while simultaneously reminding them of life in the city. The configuration of the countryside cinema as an urban home likely emerged from narratives that connected the auditorium and domestic space in the metropolis. For example, in Annette Kuhn’s study of 1930s cinemagoers, participants recalled visiting movie theatres that were close to home and that provided familiarity.98 And as evacuee Bryan Breed describes in his memoir, movie theatres were comforting sights. Driving through a rural town, he noted that ‘Attleborough did not look too bad –​for one thing, it had a cinema which looked a bit like the Cable,’ which established a visual connection to his local picture house in Stepney.99 Furthermore, Jeffrey Richards describes 1930s picture palaces that offered the comforts of the domestic sphere, while Stuart Hall contends that movie theatres shared architectural sites with suburban houses, where developers built cinemas before churches.100 For people living in urban areas, going to the cinema was an everyday, or at least regular, activity that evacuee children were likely to miss in the countryside. For example, Patricia Donald, an evacuee who travelled between her billet in Tunbridge Wells and her home in London, recounts numerous trips to the pictures in her wartime diary, including the 170

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Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity 1941 Dumbo, and repeated attempts to see the popular Henry V (1944).101 Schoolgirl evacuee S J Parkes, who moved from the Kent coast to a town in Staffordshire, writes in one diary entry that she ‘[w]‌ent to school all the day. In the evening I went to the pictures and saw Smashing the Spy Ring and Overland Express. I then went home to bed.’102 Parkes’s mundane description, in which her film viewing is sandwiched casually, yet matter-​ of-​factly, between school and bed, attests to the ordinariness of cinemagoing in metropolitan districts. Like the railway, children’s literature represented the cinema differently for boys and girls. Accordingly, the Modern Boys’ Annual incorporated stories and articles that prioritised industrial and technical aspects of filmmaking and depicted skilled labourers who worked behind the scenes. For example, Trevor Holloway, a regular cinema correspondent for the publication, revealed how animators brought still images to life, and discussed the processes that made possible ‘talkies’ and colour films.103 However, for girls, the cinema provided a conduit for emotion and identification with stars. Girls’ Own Paper explicitly depicted cinema technology as irrelevant to young women, with one character acknowledging her ignorance of the apparatus: ‘[i]‌t was all about films, enlarged screens, amplifiers, and other things of the same kind, none of which she had come across.’104 Instead, the movie theatre and its associated fan cultures instructed girls about fashion, socialising and appropriate ‘ladylike’ behaviour, with Hollywood actor Deanna Durbin writing a monthly column for British readers that covered topics from exercise and healthy eating to keeping pets and beauty regimes.105 The culturally imposed distinctions between boys’ and girls’ viewing preferences were addressed in a cinema annual, which surmised that ‘boys want action and fighting and adventure, while girls naturally want something a little quieter, maybe a domestic comedy or a musical film.’106 Nevertheless, despite presumptions about gendered spectatorship practices, adults assumed both boy and girl evacuees would appreciate film shows in the countryside, for ‘[b]eing city children, their main thought of entertainment is “the pictures.”’107 While there are no surviving accounts by evacuees in rural areas that explicitly refer to missing visits to the movie theatre, mothers evacuated with young children were interviewed about their experiences for the Daily Mail. Billeted down ‘miles of twisting, 171

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From Steam to Screen tortuous roads’ where buses were ‘rare’, a Mrs Carter of London declared ‘[w]hat wouldn’t I  give for a night at the pictures just now and then!’108 Stuck in a rural cottage with no entertainment, the woman foregrounds cinema as the means to alleviate her boredom and make life more bearable. Enterprising local councils, and later the government, realised that to prevent children making dangerous railway journeys back to the cities, the cinema had to travel to the countryside. In December 1939, The Times announced that across Britain, ‘free cinema shows are to be held in the local cinema or other halls lent by the owners’ to stem the tide of evacuees leaving their billets at Christmas, which ‘the sceptics say […] will kill evacuation’.109 Thus the festive season saw the rise of annual film screenings and parties for children in rural areas that involved local schools and entertainers, as well as Rotary Clubs, London County Council (LCC), the Women’s Voluntary Service, Women’s Institute and National Council of Social Service.110 While national newspapers implored the help of charitable and other institutions, commercial enterprises also offered services to facilitate the screenings, which enabled businesses to promote products through association with patriotism. The Cadbury brothers (then owners of the chocolate manufacturer) gained free exposure in The Times in a letter informing the public that the company was loaning equipment for  evacuee film shows.111 Another letter argued that screenings should feature educational pictures to teach children about aspects of country living  –​a topic that the writer, from Instructional Studios GB, knew all about. Oscar Deutsch, owner of the Odeon cinema chain, attempted to intervene in policymaking in a public letter to the Board of Education, in which he offered to loan his venues to screen informative, and entertainment, films to evacuees who did not attend school in the mornings.112 Moreover, as coverage in the daily press attested, in addition to the British Film Institute (a publicly funded organisation), Gaumont-British provided films for the children free of charge.113 Hence contributing to evacuee cinemas was not only a patriotic duty that guaranteed the security of the next generation, but also an excellent opportunity for advertising. At a regional level, fundraising schemes successfully procured money and services within local communities that paid for film screenings, as well as conjuring shows and tea parties that often entertained both evacuee 172

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Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity and local children.114 The public was so convinced that showing films for evacuees would make them feel at home in their billets that Labour parliamentary candidate Margaret Bondfield included ‘making arrangements for [children] to attend special matinees at cinemas and pantomimes’ in her election campaign.115 In some cases, independent cinema proprietors allowed children to watch films for free.116 But the problem for many organisers was the lack of cinemas within a practical travelling distance. As Sir Gifford Fox, an MP in Oxfordshire, complained in the Daily Mail, ‘[t]‌he nearest cinema is eight miles away at Reading,’ which meant that the local clubhouse (due to be converted into a billeting centre) was ‘the only useful meeting place for residents and evacuees in the winter evenings’.117 To overcome the issue of proximity, the Yorkshire Daily Press encouraged readers to make donations so that a group in Leeds could purchase a ‘camp cinematograph’ that would enable them to tour film shows around various evacuee districts.118 The rationale for the screenings was that cinema would remind the young attendees of home by providing excitement and recalling urban experiences. ‘[F]or, though they live among beautiful surroundings, boredom, especially in these winter days, is something that has to be fought […] This is where the camp cinematograph comes in.’119 In addition to local people contributing to the film schemes, reports suggest that people from across the Allied forces were keen to donate financially, or in the form of confectionery. At one screening in Bath, the Odeon lent the picture house, the Junior Children’s Public Schools of New South Wales, Australia, paid to hire the films on show, and American servicemen gave their personal chocolate rations to the evacuee children.120 Thus the project to protect Britain’s young people became international in scope, with the Allies’ interventions serving as propaganda that reminded the public that the nation had overseas support. Additionally, Australian and American assistance with the film shows gave the scheme greater credibility, which would have calmed parents anxious about their children’s welfare in the countryside. Of course, while the government and other institutions championed cinema as a means of replicating, and replacing, children’s urban experiences, not all commentators were positive. One dissenting writer suggested that LCC’s £5,000 budget for Christmas film shows in evacuee areas would 173

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From Steam to Screen be better spent ‘increasing the efficiency of the schools’ cleansing services, so that it would be impossible in the future for dirty children from LCC schools to be dispatched to clean homes.’121 The letter not only deplored the festive screenings as unnecessary, but also contributed to narratives about the city as an unhygienic space that bred grubby children in general, and lice in particular. Others took a moral stand against cinema and the effects of filmgoing on young people’s behaviour.122 One columnist listed popular pastimes such as ‘the pictures two or three times a week, the greyhound track, reading of cheap and common literature, filling in football coupons, and conversation at the street corner,’ as anathema to British civilisation.123 And in the letter pages of The Times, a correspondent conflated the cinema and radio’s ‘dubious delights’ with the arrival of English children in Welsh classrooms and the subsequent deteriorating use of the Welsh language.124 The people writing in opposition to evacuee film shows reveal class-​ based prejudices, for by positioning the movie theatre alongside dirt, dog racing, and the eradication of traditional, local culture, cinema attendance is framed as a working-​class pursuit not worthy of bourgeois attention. However, Richardson, writing in Close Up, proposes that cinemagoing was inclusive and habitual, ‘[f]‌or children of all classes and ages go to the cinema.’125 Moreover, public approval for the film shows remained high throughout the war, and national and local presses reported that both adults and children thought the entertainments were successful. The Manchester Guardian joked that the screenings were so essential to children remaining in their billets that ‘[t]he Government ought to have The Thief of Bagdad sent to the reception areas for Christmas, or the evacuees will be flocking back to Leicester Square.’126 Inside movie theatres in evacuation zones that were easily accessible by road or rail, children watched adventure films and comedies. For example in Wells, Somerset, evacuees travelled to a nearby cinema to watch Alice in Wonderland as their festive treat.127 The film, made in 1933, was nine years old by the time the children saw it during the war, but its subject matter was pertinent to their experiences.128 Opening in the midst of winter, in a rural house blanketed with snow, the story introduces the viewer to Alice, who is stuck inside and bored. She wanders around the middle ​class sitting room, knocking over chess pieces and being disruptive. The girl longs 174

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Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity for excitement, and she gets it when she steps through the looking glass into a backwards world in which perspective is warped and strange creatures roam the unfamiliar landscapes. Throughout the film, special effects, including transitions, puppetry, travelling matte, and animation, all make rural locations incredible. For example, back-​projection is used to invert the audience’s sense of scale as the girl drinks potions and eats toadstools, with Alice appearing as a tiny figure amid enormous lily pads and frogs. Moreover, animation is used to build and then erase the White Rabbit’s house before the girl’s eyes, and, at first, Alice relishes the visual display. However, by the time of her coronation as Queen Alice, the abundance of bizarre creatures she encounters overwhelms her, and she leaves the food fight, fireworks and chaos behind to wake contented in the parlour. Alice in Wonderland, then, reflected the evacuees’ lives in the countryside and longing to return to the more exciting city (see Figure 4.2). Alice’s acceptance of her comfortable, if mundane, domesticity encouraged children to

Figure 4.2  Alice confronts a confusing spectacle in Alice in Wonderland

(Paramount, 1933), in which the seemingly exciting world beyond the looking-glass/screen came to represent the city during the conflict. 175

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From Steam to Screen appreciate their rural billets. However, Wonderland represents not only the city, but also the cinema. Alice enters the world through a screen (by way of the mirror), and the special effects simultaneously create the illusion of reality and reveal the film’s artifice. Furthermore, despite suggestions of danger, such as the griffon, Alice is never under any actual threat, for the griffon is only laughing and the adventure is just a dream. In the context of evacuee screenings, urban and cinematic space are conflated in the film so that the movie theatre provides evacuees with a safe, mediated encounter with the mobility, spectacle and consumption necessary in modernity. Aside from Alice in Wonderland, local presses reported that popular children’s films included Disney animations, Popeye cartoons, and comedies featuring Charlie Chaplin.129 In Bedfordshire, two boys’ schools joined forces to take local and evacuee children to see The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).130 The film persuades young viewers to value the countryside more explicitly than the narrative in Alice in Wonderland, for the three-​strip Technicolor depicts Sherwood Forest and the outlaws’ bright-​coloured tunics in dazzling primary colours (with Robin’s costume specially decorated with glinting rhinestones), while the town and castle are rendered in grey.131 Furthermore, the castle is home to the usurper Prince Richard, whose desire to steal the crown carries with it the threat of Norman invasion against the Saxon population. In the great hall, artificial light by way of candles and huge fires cast shadows over the inhabitants; outside in the perpetually sunny Forest, Robin and his men live natural and healthy lives. Hence the film casts Richard and the invading Normans as Nazis, with the castle as the city under siege, and Robin and the loyal Saxons as the Allies, with Sherwood Forest representing traditional, pastoral England. If child viewers needed further convincing that the countryside was superior to the wartime metropolis, on winning the battle and receiving honours from the rightful King John, Robin, Marion, and the rest of the group return to the natural world outdoors. Among the few pictures named in reports about evacuee screenings, stories that champion rural life and feature voyages through agrarian landscapes are common. However, the press continued to frame cinemagoing in language that evoked electrification and city life, for no matter how ‘black it may be outside’, in the cinema ‘stars […] twinkle in the friendly darkness’.132 Counter to the dangerous lights from aerial 176

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Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity bombardments and threatening darkness that caused children to get lost in the city, the movie theatre provided young people with a safe approximation of the urban environment. Rural cinema shows, therefore, were designed to prevent evacuees from returning to their city residences by standing in for the children’s metropolitan homes. At one screening in a Catholic church hall, ‘the youngsters quite forgot they were far away from home as they roared their appreciation of the comic films,’ which indicated that the movies provided not only escapism, but also familiarity.133 Indeed, for evacuees in England and Wales, the cinema was a figurative ‘home from home’ that connected distant pastoral and industrial spaces.134 And in some villages, the connection between the movie theatre and living accommodation were emphasised by officials advertising for billets to house evacuees during screenings for adult audiences.135 But for some children, movie theatres became literal sites of domestication, too, as evacuation areas filled up and accommodation ran out. Consequently, an Odeon on the east coast was ‘converted to house evacuees for whom no billets were ready on their arrival.’136 In another instance, six hundred people in Oxford had to ‘live, eat and sleep free on the plush seats’ of a local super cinema.137 An article in the Daily Mail described the cramped conditions and lack of privacy that faced six hundred voluntary evacuees who left London without joining the official scheme. For example, a Mrs Walker of Brixton, with her five children aged one to sixteen, lived between the auditorium seats alongside two hundred other families that roped off sections of the theatre and brought small items of furniture to make the space more comfortable.138 Despite the unsanitary conditions, evening curfew and communal dining, residents appeared to enjoy living in the movie theatre. Three weeks after the original newspaper report’s publication, the Daily Mail informed readers that evacuee families ‘refused to leave the cinema’ following plans to convert the building into a military rest centre.139 The writer proposed that people wanted to remain at the site because they received free accommodation and meals. Yet an account in the Daily Express offered an alternative rationale. Commenting that it was a ‘[s]‌trange era in which one goes away for a weekend in a provincial cinema!’, the newspaper implied that while staying in the cinema, residents were taking a holiday from the everyday.140 177

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From Steam to Screen Rather than film screenings providing adults and children with diversions from routine daily life, the evacuees escaped the anticipated boredom of the countryside by re-​appropriating the cinema as a holiday home.

Film Exhibition and Children’s Spectatorship In towns that were not under threat from air raids, evacuees attended screenings in picture palaces and super cinemas local to their billets. Hence for children in relatively safe urban areas, such as Oxford, there was no great leap of the imagination to equate filmgoing with metropolitan architecture and patterns of consumption, which were still visible in the evacuees’ new environments. Of course, young people used to regularly updated cinema programmes in London were disenchanted with the spectacles on offer in more remote locations, as outlined in a sketch in the Dundee Courier. Child audiences accustomed to a ‘cushioned divan in the Big City cinema’ were ‘[n]‌ow for six-​pence […] sharing hard forms.’141 Then, instead of excitement when the projector ‘flickered into life’, the young viewers experienced ‘bitter disillusionment’, a feeling counter to the ‘delight’ described in other reports. Approaching the box office, the children ‘shrieked for their “tanners” back else they’d tell their mithers. “We hath saw that pictur’ two years ago,” they said.’142 The Nottingham Evening Post also featured a joke about the quality of rural cinema shows and the evacuee experience, indicating that the complaint was commonplace: Cinema attendant (to young evacuee): ‘Where’s your gas mask, sonny?’ Evacuee: ‘I’ve forgotten it, mister.’ Attendant: ‘Sorry lad, but you can’t see this picture without a gas mask.’ Evacuee: ‘Lumme, is it as bad as that?’143 However, compared to amateur screenings run in church halls, village clubs, schools, and from mobile film vans, small-​town cinemas presented children with a close approximation of life in the metropolis.144 For evacuees in isolated villages where there was limited infrastructure such as roads or railways, film exhibition took a more primitive form.145 Additionally, given that the screenings were often black and white and silent, child 178

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Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity audiences watched older pictures that transported viewers not only to the imaginary city, but also back in time. Some rural film exhibitors had the facilities to project pictures with sound and colour, including a mobile cinema in Chelmsford, where ‘[a]‌ll the films are talkies, and include amusing, educational, and travel pictures.’146 Similarly, a Devonshire businessman loaned a ‘talkie projector’ so children could watch various instructional and feature films.147 But for many evacuees, cinemagoing in the countryside was less colourful than the natural world outside. In Warwickshire, where the ‘transport of over eighty children to cinemas in Leamington or Coventry has been a practical impossibility’, the subsequent amateur show occurred in black and white and without sound. To accommodate a screening at Stoneleigh Abbey, Principal Sister Mary Francis arranged for the chairman of the Coventry Amateur Film Society, Mr L Bonham, to provide film equipment. Consequently, a ‘broad long corridor into the wing was transformed into a temporary cinema and the children saw several feature films, including a Charlie Chaplin and an Our Gang picture’ (see Figure 4.3).148 While the Our Gang shorts had

Figure 4.3  Evacuee children at Stoneleigh Abbey prepare to watch a selec-

tion of films designed to prevent them running back to the city and the lure of the urban movie theatre. See Coventry Herald, ‘Films for Stoneleigh Evacuees,’ September 23, 1939. 179

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From Steam to Screen transitioned from silent to sound by 1939, the dearth of Chaplin ‘talkies’ (the 1930 City Lights and 1936 Modern Times only featured sound effects) suggests that the screening comprised silent movies. There is no allusion in the newspaper report to a pianist, organist or other musical accompaniment, and professional musicians would have been unlikely to perform at shows specifically organised for child audiences. Consequently, the screening probably had a soundtrack that, barring the noise from the audience, was closer to silent than in the so-​called ‘silent’ era. The colourless and soundless films on many rural programmes lacked the Technicolor and dialogue that were staples in urban cinemas, as outside the major film distributors, old silent pictures remained staples in amateur circulation networks. As a result, wartime conceptions of cinemagoing for evacuees, predicated on the promise of modernity, were subverted by the medium’s archaic form, especially in more provincial settings. Sent to live in an isolated Norfolk village with a Wesleyan family, Breed and his younger brother David, both used to film shows at their local Stepney cinema, were invited to a magic lantern demonstration. Mrs Webster, the children’s foster mother, announced that they were in for a ‘treat’, which transpired was a slide projector and a ‘white sheet pinned up’ at the front of the hall.149 While the congregation sang hymns, Mr Webster ‘ran round turning down the lamps, until the only light left was the little flame in the lantern.’ He then proceeded to demonstrate the evils of drinking alcohol in a slide show that emulated motion pictures, for by ‘pulling the slide in and out,’ the projectionist ‘made the man’s arm jerk the mug to his mouth again and again.’150 The show’s moral message and religious setting are reminiscent of the Salvation Army lantern performances that were common before the advent of cinema.151 Concurrently, the projectionist moving the images attempted to recreate film’s aesthetic, and in doing so converged past and present exhibition practices for the audience. However, Breed was not convinced by the illusion and found the display’s simplicity amusing; he giggled and noted that ‘it was not as good as the Cable.’152 Thus while evacuee cinema shows sought to emulate children’s urban encounters with modernity, screenings in some cases foregrounded tradition rather than innovation. The rural cinema, therefore, offered a history lesson to children used to Technicolor and ‘talkies’ that transported spectators to the past. 180

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Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity Antiquated shows were also on offer in Scotland, where the Ministry of Information organised a mobile film van to tour the numerous ‘isolated villages and reception areas’ in the Highlands.153 Harking back to the travelling Bioscope shows described in Chapter One, mobile cinemas both emerged from, and contributed to, an earlier and cruder mode of exhibition.154 The Ministry of Information vans transported projection equipment, and silent educational and comedy films, to village halls and schools as part of the Scottish Evacuation Film Scheme. But whereas evacuees from cities likely found the shows unsophisticated, local children who had ‘never seen a moving picture’ benefited from ‘having the cinema brought to their doors’.155 While the success of a scheme that relied on silent film to transport evacuees vicariously back to the city is questionable, accounts suggest that the films instead offered local young people their first encounter with spectacle and consumption that was part of everyday urban life. In another example of a wartime return to early cinema exhibition practices, children actively participated in providing film screenings for their peers.156 One young writer in the Boys’ Own Annual describes cycling with his companions to an old coach house on a country estate.157 In a disused loft space, the group are ‘greeted by a yell of welcome’ and see that their friends are ‘fixing a screen and focusing a miniature projector’ for an amateur cinema entertainment. Not only was the location primitive, but also the show, for ‘[t]‌he display did not last long.’ The silent images offered ‘views of a storm-​wrecked coastal village found by a photographer on his last tour, a ferry-​boat absurdly overloaded by club members and their mounts, a laughing party riding through a forest’.158 That child audiences in the Second World War relied on antiquated and amateur film forms suggests that for both evacuee and local children in rural areas the nation’s modernity belonged not to the present, but the past. As older exhibition practices became embedded in contemporary pastoral life, amateur films such as the ‘Flying Scotsman, Golden Arrow and Cornish Riviera Express’ that constituted a screening at a boys’ club in Kent, not only replicated, but also evoked nostalgia for, technological innovation.159 However, while children in the countryside were likely separated from the talkies and Technicolor of the metropolis, cinemagoing was an established feature of 181

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From Steam to Screen childhood in wartime and represented both sophistication and a means by which to participate in society through consumption. Although film shows provided evacuees with an environment in which to practice urban activities such as spectatorship and mediated travel, the child did not necessarily have agency in deciding to join in the screenings. After all, national and local authorities implemented rural cinemas not only to release children from the boredom of everyday pastoral life, but also to restrict the evacuees’ mobility and keep them in what adults perceived as the safer, healthier countryside. As a result, while the figure of the child remained central to propaganda about why the nation was fighting –​with children representing the nation’s future –​young people were physically absent from the urban public sphere.160 Yet simultaneously, cinemagoing enabled children (evacuee or otherwise) to actively intervene in wartime culture. Addressing young people’s agency in the auditorium, newspaper articles frequently refer to children’s responses to the film shows. For example, in Sevenoaks, Kent, evacuees watched a picture that romanticised pastoral life, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939), alongside Technicolor shorts, ‘all of which were appreciated to the full.’161 In the Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser, a local newspaper in Devon, a journalist reports that ‘it was pleasant to see the enjoyment with which they [the children] watched the film entertainment.’162 Another article exclaimed, ‘[w]‌hat delight the children got out of it! Happy shouts and excited laughter mingled together as they watched the two comic films’.163 On the one hand, details about how young people reacted to the screenings alluded to children’s agency as viewers. Smith describes how, in the 1930s, children’s cinemagoing culture ‘was essentially unique, in that it gave children a sense of ownership and control of public space –​the cinema –​which was unavailable to them elsewhere.’164 Child audiences in the 1940s were similarly free to show disinterest or disappointment in the pictures but were instead displaying ‘delight’, and the reports recognise children as active spectators within the cinema. Moreover, in a wartime culture determined to make children disappear from metropolitan areas, evacuee films facilitated young people appearing outside domestic, countryside locations. As such, young people smile and pull faces for the camera in 182

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Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity Child Evacuees from Brighton (1940), and, as the voiceover announces in Front Line London (1944), ‘get quite a little thrill at being in the eye of the newsreel’.165 Cinema enabled children both to emulate urban practices of travel, spectatorship, and consumption in the auditorium, and to assert their presence in the visible public sphere on screen. On the other hand, journalists did not interview any child viewers about their experiences, which were mediated instead by adult writers. Moreover, the articles likely functioned as propaganda that reassured parents the evacuees were happy in their billets. By observing young people watching films, reporters, alongside cinema workers, teachers, billeting officers and local officials, contributed to a surveillance culture within the auditorium. Together, adults controlled the film programme and supervised children’s behaviour in the cinema, which undermined the young audience’s autonomy. One commentator supported special evacuee screenings precisely because of the control that the shows offered, suggesting that ‘[t]‌otal deprivation of the cinema might result in [children] wandering aimlessly or mischievously about the village streets.’166 And while children’s magazines emphasised the child’s agency in contributing to film culture, adult writers were implicitly teaching readers how to be spectators. Richardson, writing in Close Up, suggests that young viewers needed instruction because children do not see the world in the same way as adults, owing to the ‘fact that children look chiefly at, and only very slightly through, what they see, only within the limits of their small experience.’167 Adults, she argued, should direct what and how young people watched. In keeping with Richardson’s approach, one critic noted in a review that ‘if you are anything like a normal chap, however, you will leave the cinema saying “[g]‌osh! What fun that film was!” and forget the moral behind it. Because that is all that matters’.168 In directing young viewers to seek amusement in the cinema, the writer instructs children how to behave as consumers, which undermines notions of agency. The introduction in 1943 of cinema clubs, such as the Odeon National Cinema Club for Boys and Girls and the Gaumont-​British Junior Club, similarly embedded covert adult governance in narratives about autonomy for young audiences.169 The groups encouraged ‘a spirit of loyalty to the club and fellow-​members’ through oath-​taking, and suggested children take responsibility for their 183

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From Steam to Screen own viewing habits through self-​surveillance, which included monitoring systems, election to committees, and submitting film requests.170 In analysing transformations to childhood in the early to mid-​twentieth century, Cunningham argues that, while parenting advice books encouraged adults to enable consumption, the state increasingly scrutinised education, health and other aspects of childhood.171 The simultaneous freedom and limitation afforded by cinemagoing represents broader patterns in thinking about childhood in the Second World War. By watching movies, children engaged in spectatorship and vicarious travel with an illusory freedom, for adults always oversaw the young audiences’ viewing habits. Yet although adults were responsible for filmmaking, implementing rules about cinemagoing, and determining codes of conduct in the auditorium, the cinema did at least provide young people with opportunities to participate in Britain’s wartime cultures of modernity.

Conclusion By September 1944, people evacuated from the nation’s industrial regions began returning to the large towns and cities as the threat of aerial bombardment receded. The Daily Mail reported that ‘London itself has made up its mind that the menace of V1 is gone. Theatre takings have suddenly leapt up, new shows are coming, cinemas and restaurants are packed.’172 Still subject to lighting restrictions in the blackout, busy movie theatres nevertheless demonstrated that life in the metropolis was returning to normal. Consequently, train services heading into urban areas lost their association with danger and became routine as evacuees flocked home. Moreover, reports in both national and local presses about evacuee film shows diminished as children no longer required incentives to stay in the countryside. However, the cinema was significant in young people’s lives during the war, which is revealed in both adults’ and children’s media. For instance, in a girls’ magazine story, the Bentham sisters consider going to the pictures ‘a tremendous treat’ and their encounter with the screen leaves them ‘both aglow with excitement.’173 Additionally, both the Modern Boys’ Annual and Girls’ Own Paper began regular film columns during the war. The monthly 184

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Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity articles were produced in association with the British Film Institute, which, owing to the BFI’s role in educating the nation about motion pictures, demonstrates cinemagoing’s elevated status as a pastime suitable for children.174 Furthermore, in adult eyes, the evacuee film shows were so successful at making children feel at home that a 1945 newspaper cartoon suggested the movie theatres had become more important to children than being reunited with family. Thus when asked if he is looking forward to returning to his parents, Jimmy ‘doubtfully’ responds, ‘I want to see my mother, but I don’t want to go before the serial at the cinema is finished!’175 For Jimmy, the pictures have bridged the gaps between the city and countryside, and the boy is content to experience urban life on screen as a mediated tourist. As Giuliana Bruno attests, film is ‘the panoramic and embodied visual space of modernity’.176 Cinema was, then, the ideal alternative to the train journey for children wanting to engage in cultures of consumption in wartime Britain. Consequently, for child spectators, the world had become what Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes as ‘one huge department store of countryside and cities’ in which ‘film brings things closer to the viewer’.177 In movie theatres, young people could switch vicariously between metropolitan and rural spaces and, in amateur shows, between different temporalities in the past and present. As Chapter Five explores, children were among passengers also cast as spectators in Britain’s cinema trains prior to the Second World War, where patrons were encouraged to inhabit multiple spatial and temporal positions. However, during the conflict, when rail travel became associated with proximity to urban destruction, the cinema alone enabled child audiences to occupy liminal positions both here –​in the auditorium –​and there –​beyond the screen. Filmgoing gave children freedom to participate in the travel, spectatorship and consumption connected to the peacetime city, while simultaneously limiting young people’s mobility within the wartime countryside. According to Richardson, films represent ‘the magic garden, the dreams and fantasies and fairy tales,’ essential to childhood, while also configuring ‘the city of familiar life within which soon enough it [the child] must learn its place.’178 Hence child viewers could autonomously escape into childhood’s magic gardens and simultaneously learn to negotiate urban, 185

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From Steam to Screen adult spaces without being exposed to dangers in cities that were under attack. The cinema’s artificial darkness and replication of domestic space also contributed to the medium’s essential role in children’s lives during the conflict. Bruno proposes that in the auditorium, ‘[l]‌ike the flaneur, the film spectator sees without  being seen, rejoicing in his incognito:  seeing the world, at the centre of the world, he is, nonetheless, hidden from it’.179 So it was that children’s encounters with modernity in the Second World War were predicated on the same fluctuations and simultaneity as adults’ negotiations:  they were stationary and yet  also vicariously mobile; homeless yet occupying domestic space; tourists that did not travel; and invisible in urban space while remaining central to visible narratives about the nation’s victory. Thus the cinema and railways materially altered children’s established routines while also ensuring that everyday life carried on as normal.

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5 The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire

On March 12, 1924, the first British cinema train was unveiled at King’s Cross Station in London. The movie coach made tangible both the historic and aesthetic intersections between film and rail technologies. In the motion picture carriage, the train’s rhythm on the track was inflected by the shutter gate’s whir; twenty-​four frames per second marked time’s passing alongside the minutes in the railway timetable. Audiences in the cinema watched films inside a moving coach, thus altering how film and rail technologies intervened in everyday life by marrying two ordinary spaces in one architectural site. Inside the space, spectators simultaneously travelled through both imagined and actual landscapes, transforming movement and vision. A product of Britain’s particular experience of modernity, the movie coach was both formed by, and contributed to, the nation’s expanding networks of visual consumption. Patrons’ views and movements from inside the train were commoditised twice over, as customers paid to be both passengers and spectators in the same space. In this chapter, I examine how, and why, the spaces and practices of the cinema and the train physically converged by contextualising the cinema coach’s emergence within the railway and moving images’ shared history. My examination of the movie coach frames an investigation into broader

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From Steam to Screen cultural changes taking place in Britain in the early to mid-​twentieth ­century, because the film carriage not only registers alterations in industrial practices, but was also a space in which tradition and innovation converged. The cinema train was a site that offered customers a new way to experience the world, yet was also an architecture in which an imperialist rhetoric was expounded in the newsreels projected onscreen (for example, in the 1938 British Pathé film New Berth for Bananas).1 Similar frictions were prevalent in British society, as the nation witnessed both social improvements in the aftermath of the First World War, with suffrage expanding between 1918 and 1928, and also stasis, in that myths about British colonial supremacy were perpetuated in popular culture.2 As such, the history of mobile screens and cinema trains enables us to interrogate the tensions between the nation’s imperial, hierarchical antecedents and the more socially inclusive future that was conceived by the British government after the Second World War. The chapter thus offers an archaeological inquiry of British media and their mobility that situates the cinema and the train in a narrative about empire, technology and modernity. I propose that developments in filmic rail technologies are indicative of material transformations to public space that occurred in the first half of the twentieth century, because the carriage-​auditorium was both inclusive (admission, in theory, was open to all patrons regardless of class or gender) and exclusive (as the newsreels screened in the coaches defined a national identity that was restricted to particular groups). As such, the cinema train was the physical manifestation of the frictions between hierarchy and democracy, individualism and egalitarianism that were also evident in the narratives about class, ethnicity and gender discussed in the previous chapters. The coming of the movie carriage heralded a new era of technological innovation on the railways in Britain. While Russian agit-​trains already featured projectors and screens, films were only shown when the vehicles were stationary. In Britain, one watched movies on the move, vicariously travelling through the world on screen while also being propelled through the physical landscape on the train. Inside the railway movie theatre, passengers were invited to view silent Hollywood features in a blacked-​out carriage that served as an auditorium, with

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire the Railway Gazette describing the venture as ‘an unqualified success’.3 Nevertheless, the first incarnation of the movie coach was short-​lived; the convergence of silent films and noisy railway carriages was not a success. Consequently, the cinema train did not become a regular feature on British railways until 1935 when the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) went into partnership with British Pathé, a film production and distribution company. The LNER-​Pathé movie coach showed newsreels in a carriage better designed for a cinematic experience, and the service between London and Leeds proved so popular that additional film carriages were put into operation between the English capital and Edinburgh.4 People from all walks of life, including children and businessmen, religious groups and royalty, visited the movie coach and so shared in a singular experience of moving and looking at the world.5 The film carriage’s visitor numbers totalled approximately 3,200 per month in an auditorium that seated forty people, a figure that indicates the technology’s popularity with the travelling public. Customers who purchased tickets for the Pathé-​LNER shows were contributing to an increasingly leisure-​oriented economy that was predicated on the sale of visual culture –​and as wages improved and the distinction between work and home life was entrenched, people were better able to spend their time as tourists.6 In the first part of this chapter, I explore how transport and the movies have crossed paths since the late ​nineteenth century, both figuratively (in fiction films and travelogues), and materially (for example, in war-​time cinema vans). Here, I propose that the movie coach was not only a product of modernity, but of nostalgia, too, for older entertainment media, and so registers the friction between tradition and innovation that was prevalent in British culture more broadly throughout the era. Next, the chapter looks inside the 1935 carriage-​auditorium to examine its design and function, and interrogates the mobile theatre’s connections both to empire and formations of national identity, before exploring the film carriage’s post-​war iterations. Moreover, the chapter examines how the movie coach was given an afterlife on screen, in both Brief Encounter (1945) and Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948).7

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From Steam to Screen Finally, I  situate the film carriage on the thresholds between interior and exterior space, and the modern and traditional, to demonstrate that the hybrid cinema-​train accommodated complex spatial practices that were symptomatic of Britain’s changing technological and colonial position in the post-​war world. The movie coach, which was innovative in the 1920s, then luxurious throughout the 1930s, and gradually obsolescent in post-​war culture, reflects transformations in Britain’s trajectory as a global political power over the same period. Thus disparities between the space’s projected image of innovation (evidenced in a 1935 British Pathé newsreel film that reported the film carriage’s inception), and the actual images projected inside the auditorium (which were jingoistic in tone), allude to anxieties about the nation’s changing international role.8 However, while recognising the failure of film-​carriage technologies, I conclude by proposing that the cinema train contributed to leisure and information industries that –​especially through mobile news media –​are manifest in our everyday lives even now.

The Emergence of the Movie Coach Britain’s early mobile film exhibition was characterised by economic gain. There were notable exceptions –​for example, in the late nineteenth century, the Salvation Army used magic lantern slides (and subsequently film projectors) to accompany public lectures, and mounted moving image apparatus in coaches to disseminate the Church’s teachings across Britain. But entertainment was the primary product of motion pictures, and was sold as part of a growing leisure industry. Furthermore, travel, a pastime associated with holidaymaking, not only contributed to cinema’s distribution but also featured as a popular movie genre. In 1903, following the success of Thomas Edison’s Life of an American Fireman (an early attempt at narrative cinema), ‘sixty one of the next sixty-​two films copyrighted by [his company in the United States] were travel films’.9 Travel  culture pervaded the cinematic: films encouraged watching, and moving through, alien spaces by divorcing the imaginary from the bodily experience. As described in Chapter One, the cinematograph in Britain thrived by taking train journeys and then rendering those journeys 190

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire on celluloid in phantom rides and travelogues; the railway, therefore, guaranteed the film industry sought-​after box office returns. One example of the successful commercialisation of the two technologies’ convergence was Hale’s Tours, a venture imported from the United States. Hale’s Tours was the earliest incarnation of the cinema train, although the exhibition sites imitated, rather than occupied, railway spaces. As part of the initial design for the so-​called ‘tour’, passengers would travel in a first-​class carriage along tracks into a tunnel, from where they would enter a second carriage to watch the films.10 However, in the actual experience, showcased in 1904 at the St Louis World’s Fair, the cinema’s ticket booth was designed to replicate the frontage of a train station, and inside, the auditorium functioned like a carriage.11 Philippe Gauthier describes how uneven rails, fans, train whistles and bursts of steam aided the so-​called passengers’ interpolation in the simulated environment.12 The films shown inside the theatre-​carriage were also produced to enhance the spectators’ travel experience, as filmmakers shot moving images (literal tracking shots) on cameras attached to locomotives and subsequently the images were projected onto the auditorium’s screen. One visitor to Hale’s ‘tourist cars’ on Oxford Street in London described how the ‘vivid’ travelogues had the audience ‘immediately transported to Cape Town,’ with the auditorium ‘so manipulated that it rocked like a tram-​car’.13 Where once the rail network had conveyed portable film equipment to temporary screenings, now the cinema transported spectators to the railway. Moreover, the show made further use of the train by commissioning films from rail companies in the USA, Australia and Britain.14 Consequently, one reviewer reported that passengers were ‘seated in a veritable Pullman car, which appears to be travelling on the ever-​present metals through mountainous scenery, over bridges, across vast prairie lands, or Eastern deserts,’ and that ‘the illusion is perfect.’15 Likely owing both to its novelty and high production values, Hale’s Tours was popularised across the United States and Europe. In 1908, a similar initiative was suggested in Italy. Giuliana Bruno writes that film magazine La lanterna featured an article entitled ‘Even Cinema on the Train’.16 The publication proposed that cinema coaches might one day exist alongside traditional dining cars on rail journeys. Thus the possibilities for 191

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From Steam to Screen the train and the moving image’s physical intersection were acknowledged early in cinema’s history. Yet the film carriage’s actualisation was not then realised in Britain, likely owing to changing exhibition practices that saw Hale’s Tours decline in popularity and completely disappear between 1913 and 1915.17 The rise of permanent cinema spaces in Britain preceded a decline in both phantom rides and mobile theatres: Toulmin cites ‘the growth in popularity of the cinema’ as the main reason for diminishing numbers of travelling shows.18 However, the 1909 Cinematograph Act also contributed to the depletion of mobile shows, as government legislation insisted all commercial cinemas adhere to safety regulations (including fire-​resistant casing around the highly flammable celluloid) that were inspected by local authorities. The industry responded and, by 1914, Britain was home to 3,800 permanent, registered cinemas.19 Moreover, with the emergence of narrative film and a more developed cultural understanding of onscreen space (enhanced by cross-​cuts and linear editing), longer shows furthered the rise of cinema’s architectural permanence as spectators sought more comfortable viewing experiences. Inside the static auditoriums, movies did continue to borrow from the train journey’s aesthetics, as the travelogue still proved a successful genre with audiences. Viewers remained in their seats but were visually transported to exotic locales beyond the screen. However, more nuanced filmic language rendered the physical signifiers of transport –​the steam, whistles and fans –​obsolete, as audiences vicariously travelled through images alone. Yet for practical reasons mobile cinemas regained popularity during the First World War. Jon Burrows contends that, during the conflict, an estimated seven to eight hundred cinemas were closed down in Britain.20 Taxation, lack of raw materials, and decreased manpower all likely contributed to the shrinking number of auditoriums, and mobile theatres offered a solution to the problem. As a result, in 1914, the government equipped the British army with a series of ‘travelling cinemas’ to show information and propaganda films to the public from the backs of trucks.21 By 1920, the commercial benefits of the ‘Motor Cinema’ were also realised when the proprietors of a new company called for investment to tour films in mining districts where ‘[m]‌otion [p]icture [e]ntertainments [did] not exist’.22 The 192

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire cinema was no longer an innovation for the few, but a serious news and entertainment source for the many (although the 1921 screening of the first in-​flight movie, Howdy Chicago, as part of Chicago’s ‘Pageant of Progress’ exposition shows that novelty still played a part in film exhibition). The cinema, and access to it, was expanded for its potential to generate revenue; as the ‘Motor Cinema’ advertisement suggests, a national company and its shareholders supplanted what had traditionally been one man and his Bioscope. While in Britain business people explored the possible intersections between the projector and the road, in interwar Russia, the mobile cinema was adapted for the railway: with vast distances to cover between provincial audiences, the truck was not a viable option. The agit-​train (so-​ called because it showed ‘agitational’ films), established by the Military Department of the All-​Russian Central Executive Committee in 1918, was the first mobile movie theatre on rails.23 The trains travelled throughout the Soviet countryside to disseminate news and propaganda to those who lived in villages, and tickets for the shows, which took place inside static carriages, totalled 300 million in one year.24 The agit-​trains constituted advancements in both rail and film technologies, as the coaches housed not only projectors and screens for viewings, but also cameras and printing equipment. The realisation of Russia’s technological prowess, the agit-​train was the production site, as well as the screening space, for the government’s multimedia propaganda campaign. The Russian model initially proved successful and was indicative of the country’s modern ‘surface culture’. Peter Kenez notes that ‘the Bolsheviks coined the term kinofikatsiia, “cinefication,” to denote this campaign’.25 He argues that this was analogous to elektrifikatsiia, or ‘electrification’, another facet of modernity. But the project failed because it did not prove economically viable, as permanent cinemas and radio networks, which dematerialised communication practices, were cheaper to run. While Dziga Vertov, another agit-​train proponent, used film to serve both ‘local government agencies and private enterprise wishing to advertise,’ the project was about state control rather than industry.26 The British movie coach was made to suit a different agenda: profits, rather than propaganda, called for novel entertainment. Although in the 193

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From Steam to Screen UK the British Broadcasting Corporation began radio transmissions in 1922, the bodily experience of modernity continued to fascinate audiences. In 1923, following government announcements about plans for expanding air transport services, one commentator remarked that the railways would have to respond to competition through innovation, and forecast a day when ‘cinemas, wireless concerts, and other amusements would be given on long-​distance trains.’27 Thus, emulating the film entertainments given on overnight rail services between Chicago, Milwaukee and St Paul in the United States, the LNER introduced mobile screenings in film carriages, which differed from Russian agit-​trains that had to remain stationary while projecting films.28 Unlike both the US and Russian iterations of the movie coach, in Britain the technology was embedded in discourses about empire. The train in the 1920s was an integral mechanism in Britain’s imperialism because innovation on the railway was central to the nation’s colonial project. Successive governments from the Victorian era into the twentieth century had established rail networks across Asia (through India and Burma), and Africa (through Egypt, Uganda and South Africa). Britain also financed railways in both North and South America. Trains extended trade routes from ports to production sites, enabling the efficient transportation of great quantities of goods, and in nations exploited by colonialism the train might symbolise Britain’s violent conquest of the land. However, in Britain, the railway was configured as an inclusive space that enabled people to rise above their social station. In March 1924, Mr J H Thomas, Secretary of State for the Dominions, praised the British constitution as one ‘that enabled an engine-​ cleaner of yesterday to be a Secretary-​of-​State today’.29 The Times article that reported Thomas’s speech was headlined ‘An Example to the World’, referring not only to the empire, but also to the Secretary, who had worked as an engine-​cleaner in his youth before joining the Labour Party. Thomas, who was Britain’s representative to the colonies, thus alluded to both the nation’s supremacy and the more American ideal of personal improvement in a speech that was fraught with tensions between imperialist tradition and social progression. The railway’s role in empire building was emphasised by the 1924 British Empire Exhibition (held at what came to be known as Wembley 194

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire Stadium), which featured displays put together by Britain and fifty-​six of the dominion nations. The event featured a ‘Never Stop Railway’ to move visitors between each exhibition space, a novelty that mimicked Britain’s international rail network.30 The Exhibition also incorporated stands promoting Britain’s business interests. Major railway companies, newspapers and manufacturers were invited to demonstrate their technological prowess to visiting foreign dignitaries. Ostriches, Royal Air Force aeroplanes and the LNER’s Flying Scotsman (the engine attached to the cinema train and famed for its speed) jostled for space alongside one another. Despite the fact that France, Germany and the United States were both economically, and technologically, surpassing Britain, the movie coach’s invention both supported the ongoing narrative of British supremacy and simultaneously helped further it.31 By 1924, the recently consolidated ‘Big Four’ rail companies (LNER, London Midland and Scotland (LMS), Great Western (GWR), and Southern (SR)) faced increasing competition from the road, sea and air. The train journey had to be set apart: while Britain’s roads were not yet ready for mass motoring, advertisers were doing their best to encourage it. Rail networks also had to compete with one another in a fight for custom. As Britain’s tourism industry grew, the four railway companies had to find new ways to improve and advertise their services, as tourism was imperative to their economic survival. Thus the film carriage was an advertising ploy for the LNER, as well as a response to changing modes of transportation. The movie coach invited passengers to rethink the railway spaces they had grown accustomed to and showed there were still new ways to experience train travel. The 1924 LNER film carriage was designed to modernise, and so advertise, the company’s cutting-​edge services in a saturated rail-​leisure industry. An LNER official emphasised the movie coach’s role in facilitating passengers’ needs and suggested that the entertainment’s success depended  on  ‘the  travelling public’.32 He claimed:  ‘We think they will appreciate our effort to make their rail journeys more pleasant.’ That the cinematic was experienced on the move made the cinema train, and the nation by proxy, more advanced than its Soviet counterpart  –​although the already existing US version remained absent from any promotional 195

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From Steam to Screen literature in Britain. The carriage was attached to the Flying Scotsman service, enabling the LNER to combine speed (the engine), electricity (the projector) and the moving image. The train and the cinema, which were both manifestations of modernity, had already transformed experiences of time and space in the nineteenth century and offered an even newer form of mobility to the visiting passenger-​spectator. Audiences in the movie coach both watched and moved through two different spaces, simultaneously travelling in the coach and beyond the screen. As such, the railway and the cinema, each with their own well-​established histories, set in motion a new way to experience the world through their architectural intersection. Inside the LNER movie coach, the specially selected audience of twenty watched the 1923 costume drama Ashes of Vengeance on the down journey from London.33 On the up route from York, the mobile movie theatre premiered Frank Lloyd’s Black Oxen (1924).34 The audience comprised officials, the public, and journalists from national, local and trade presses. The Manchester Guardian lauded the ‘experiment’ as ‘a first in the history of British railway enterprise’.35 A reporter at a local newspaper described an auditorium complete with ‘armchairs […and] sensational posters advertising the film,’ and a screen ‘about half the size of a screen generally found in a small picture house.’36 To guarantee the safety of passengers at the show, the railway company furnished the auditorium with fire extinguishers, and ensured that ‘[t]‌he display is run by “cold” light, with batteries in the projector room,’ to prevent the risk of fire from the apparatus.37 Visually recording the space, an article in the Illustrated London News was accompanied by two drawings that showed the coach’s interior. The first detailed the lantern room, and the second showed the spectators turned towards the screen –​the only source of light in the artificially darkened space. There were drawbacks to the railway cinema, for there was the ‘oscillation inevitable in an end coach’ that had to be overcome.38 Also there was ‘the difficulty of keeping the coach perfectly dark’.39 The Horsham Times noted that the auditorium was darkened using blinds and curtains, suggesting that the carriage used for the movie theatre was not structurally altered to remove the windows.40 The experience of watching a silent film with no musical accompaniment while on a train was also likely to be a 196

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire claustrophobic one that constantly reminded audiences of their rail-​bound surroundings. And, as one critic lamented, the show distracted passengers from the scenery passing the window; decrying cinema entertainments on trains and in aeroplanes, he suggested the novelty was akin to ‘turning on the gramophone when a lark sings.’41 Yet, contrary to arguments about the failure of motion pictures to surpass the images moving past the window, another reporter attested that ‘[h]‌itherto, railway travellers have had to be content with the moving pictures provided by nature through the carriage window.’ With the movie coach’s advent, however, art was ‘to compete with nature.’42 The comparison channelled the machine/​agrarian dichotomy that characterised the early railway and was documented in J M Turner’s Rain, Steam, Speed.43 The film carriage’s propensity to battle nature, and thus destabilise established experiences of time and space, was a familiar trope, but one that nevertheless ensured publicity in the daily press.44 Furthermore, passenger feedback suggested that the endeavour was successful, with a reporter in the Grantham Journal assuring readers that the ‘experiment’, in a ‘saloon car specially fitted to represent a miniature Picture Palace,’ would break up ‘the tedious monotony’ of their journey.’45 Similarly, the cinema train was couched in scientific terms in other news publications; journalists for The Times, the Manchester Guardian, the Illustrated London News and Railway Gazette, among others, reported on the first moving cinema as an ‘experiment’.46 While the Railway Gazette reminded its readers that ‘[f]‌rom a railway operating point of view many matters have to be carefully considered before [public] travelling cinemas become possible,’ overall the press lauded the enterprise as a forward march in progress.47 In the film carriage’s wake, hybrid exhibition spaces were not only popularised across the British rail network as advertising, technology, and the tourism industry became closer connected, but also elsewhere in Europe, as rail providers in Germany and Czechoslovakia planned their own movie coaches.48 Despite initial interest in the mobile film carriage, the LNER did not expand cinema services across the railway network, with the costs of converting coaches to auditoriums and hiring films prohibitive, and the novelty of watching films silently probably limited. However, the cinema train instead 197

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From Steam to Screen proved useful in an imperial context, and was used by the British government to promote the nation’s technological innovation to guests from the colonies and dominions. In 1926, the London, Midland and Scotland Railway partnered with the British arm of French newsreel provider Pathé Frères to provide films for Indian and New Zealand officials travelling between Glasgow and London. Emulating the LNER service, the LMS transformed a saloon into a ‘model cinema’ seating twenty people and screened the film Our Britain.49 To accompany the silent picture, three Glaswegian cinema musicians played Land of Hope and Glory, with vocals provided by baritone Alec Main.50 The effect of the patriotic-​sounding film, which prioritised the locus of imperial authority in its title, and nationalistic song performed in a novel travelling theatre for colonial guests, was to reinforce Britain’s status as a leader in world politics and industry. Subsequently, in 1927, visitors to the Imperial Agricultural Research Conference, which received representatives ‘from all corners of the Empire’, were invited to watch films shot and curated by the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) on a train journey between Edinburgh and London.51 Although the movie coach ran on an LNER line, it was unlikely the same carriage advertised in 1924, as the Derby Daily Telegraph reported that the new version (which possibly was a refit) featured ‘[c]‌omfortable chairs [that] had been borrowed from an hotel’.52 Describing the apparatus and theatre interior, one journalist was impressed by the show, in which: Chairs were ranged in rows of four along one side, and the films were projected on the other. In this way forty people together saw the show in comfort […] Although the screen measured only 4 ½ feet square, it served the purpose admirably. Projection was by means of a portable machine, which met all the safety requirements without use of a special fireproof box for the operator. The train was travelling at 60 miles an hour, but the motion of the train had little or no effect on the projection.53

Inside the cinema, men and women watched industrial films that promoted Britain’s innovative and apparently world-​leading farming techniques, including The Life of a Plant; The Story of a Leaf; Potato Culture; Electricity on a Farm (A Vision of the Future); and Modern Poultry Culture.54 198

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire The films, like their subject matter and exhibition space, used up-​to-​date and speeded-​up technology to impress viewers, with one picture including rapid motion photography that represented a flower growing at 50,000 times its natural rate.55 That the enterprise was of major imperial significance was underscored by the presence on the train of both Major Walter Elliot, under-​Secretary for Scotland and Chairman of the Films Committee of the EMB, and John Grierson, who was responsible for the organisation’s filmmaking.56 Like its LMS predecessor, the movie coach augmented Britain’s self-​projected, technological supremacy within the empire. Following positive feedback from conference delegates and members of the press about the show, which featured short industrial films rather than features, the LNER began investigating the possibility of introducing cinema coaches on regular services. The Aberdeen Journal reported that the rail firm was negotiating with a cinema company to supply films and projection apparatus, and assured readers that ‘[t]‌he scheme is being considered solely on its merits as a commercial proposition, and there is no question of a “stunt” about it.’57 Thus, in 1929, buoyed by the coming of film sound and support from a major theatrical distributor, the LNER galvanised its efforts to introduce a permanent mobile movie theatre, and staged a number of test runs on special and holiday services to gauge the commercial success of the operation in the early 1930s. Consequently, passengers on the London to Yarmouth express in 1931, and children on a school trip to York in 1933, were treated to film screenings during their journeys.58 Modern technology, then, invaded the train in a bid to lure new, and even old, customers to the railways, and the LNER led the way in its efforts to update passenger services. The Southern Railway invested heavily in both electrification and air travel (the company advertised its connections to airfields) while the Great Western relied on its Cornish Riviera Express service (from London to Devon and Cornwall) to entice customers. The rail companies also struck deals with movie producers in a bid to advertise their lines on the big screen. For example, The Wrecker (1929) made extensive use of the Southern Railway’s lines and locomotives –​a positive endorsement despite the film’s multiple train crashes.59 However, the modernisation that occurred inside trains was most extensively carried out in the London and North Eastern Railway’s carriages. 199

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From Steam to Screen The cinema train expanded possibilities for the leisure industry and Britain’s political standing abroad. But while newspapers gave unanimously good reviews, the movie coach did not yet become a permanent fixture on the railway. Throughout the 1920s, other forms of transport were dominating the press: liners, aeroplanes and motor cars offered potentially faster, or more exciting diversions. The railway, therefore, had to compete with the romantic thrill of the road as cars were glamorised in the daily press.60 For example, the Illustrated London News ran a weekly feature entitled ‘Chronicle of the Car’, and in the edition preceding the cinema train article, there were twelve car adverts in its back pages (including those for Vauxhall, Wolseley and Rover).61 To distinguish its services and attract passengers, the LNER introduced a variety of pioneering rail services in the interwar period. Radio was introduced on LNER trains in 1930 and continued until 1935: headphones were hired for one shilling and, as Christian Wolmar describes, connected passengers to ‘the latest news and a selection of gramophone records, hosted by the world’s first mobile DJ.’62 On February 1, 1932, the ‘Baird process’ for transmitting images was successfully implemented inside an LNER train.63 The ‘Baird process’ referred to John Logie Baird’s invention of television in 1925, seven years prior to the railway experiment. The broadcast took place on a train that, even as it ‘touched speeds up to seventy miles per hour’, still enabled spectators to observe an image.64 Passengers using the service were able to hire sterilised headphones ‘for a nominal fee’ to watch the broadcast.65 That such additions to the railway were short-​lived demonstrates the limited lifespan of the shock of the new. But the feats served to advertise the rail company through the accompanying articles in broadsheet newspapers, which positioned the LNER’s services as both cutting-​edge and domesticated as customers were offered the most u ​ p-​to-​date technologies in homely comfort. With headphone hire at one shilling (or twelve pence, then more expensive than the cost of an ordinary cinema ticket), these were promotions that middle- and upper-​class passengers were invited to enjoy. Other endeavours relied on corporate advertising, rather than public services, to help the railways hit the headlines. In 1934, Prime Minister James Ramsey Macdonald ‘acted as guard to Britain’s first “musical train”.’66 200

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire This was a GWR vehicle kitted out by British firm HMV to showcase ‘a wide range of gramophone and radio instruments’ while the train was on display at stations.67 The vehicle embarked on a 3,000-​mile tour around Britain. HMV was promoted both at home and overseas by the Prime Minister’s endorsement, while MacDonald benefited from his association with technological enterprise. The ‘Big Four’ recognised media organisations as offering cheap publicity, just as train companies before them had seen potential in travelogues. Now, though, train travel was vicariously publicised through marketing HMV’s products. In a similar case in June 1935, the Southern Railway was advertised for testing a new ‘Radio-​Phone’ that allowed a two-​way conversation to take place between the driver and the guard.68 In the same period, the LNER also introduced cocktail bars, hair salons and showers in their coaches.69 The Great Western Railway (GWR) also modernised its services by setting up a joint venture with the Post Office in 1935. Messengers holding ‘an illuminated button bearing the words “Telegrams Accepted” ’ stood on platforms at Paddington Station so passengers could send messages before their trains departed.70 Sir Kingsley Wood, the postmaster general, ‘hoped that railway travellers would more and more use this rapid method of communication’.71 Electric light, rail travel and the promise of speed transformed an everyday task  –​sending a telegram  –​into something exciting. The LMS, meanwhile, offered a door-​to-​door removal service that travelled by both truck and train; mundane ‘[f]‌urniture [r]emovals’ were recast as ‘[m]odern [f]ashion’.72 The railway companies continually adopted everyday activities and reinvented them, always mixing the old with the new. Thus entertainment technologies transformed public transport spaces throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The effects of the Great Depression on the working classes in particular in 1929, and the devaluation of the gold standard in 1931, both contributed to a narrative about the nation’s economic decline, but stories about innovation represented Britain in a more positive light. Mobile film shows were essential to the narrative of imperialism and supremacy on water as well as land. On May 27, 1935, it was reported that the French Normandie would premiere Pasteur (1935) on the ship’s maiden voyage 201

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From Steam to Screen to the United States.73 Like the 1924 LNER movie coach, the Normandie garnered international publicity through claiming a debut film screening and the liner won the Blue Riband on its first Atlantic crossing.74 The pressure on Britain to respond to technological advances from international counterparts including France, Germany, and the US, was constant. Later in 1935, Cunard-​White Star furnished the liner Queen Mary with three separate cinemas. The theatres were designed to accommodate passengers in first class, third class, and the ship’s temporary visitors in the tourist lounge. Those on board could ‘go to the pictures [while] the giant vessel [was] at sea,’ with the contract to supply the cinema equipment awarded to Gaumont-​British ‘in the face of keen foreign competition’.75 The Queen Mary was an advertisement for Britain’s technological proficiency as well as for Cunard-​White Star: the ship’s owner, along with Gaumont-​British, was the nation’s representative to the world. Less than a year later, even non-​ commercial Royal Mail ships were fitted with projectors to screen films for the staffs.76 The 1935 LNER-​Pathé film carriage thus emerged from a history of mobile screens as an innovative technology that was particular to the nation’s modernity. The movie coach boosted railway revenue, encouraged the leisure industry’s expansion, and demonstrated that Britain was creating innovative entertainment spaces. Screens sprang up in trucks, planes and ships, while television altered how images were both literally and figuratively received. Media and communication devices (including television and radio) were developing, and, when integrated into mobile spaces, enabled rail companies to modernise services. Furthermore, the connection between the railways and cinema was reciprocal, for, as discussed in Chapter Three, the image of the train permeated popular culture in the mid-​1930s. Movies including Cock o’ the North (1935), The Silent Passenger (1935) and The 39 Steps (1935) all depicted the railway on screen.77 Film sets replicated actual locomotives, real trains were used for location shoots, and cinema atriums became stations.78 Newsreel theatres were also popularised at major transport sites, including London Victoria and Waterloo.79 Trains even decorated cinema frontages, with the Norwood in Glasgow featuring a functioning model railway, complete with a scaled-​down Forth Bridge, on its roof.80 Yet while the film and cinema industries continued to 202

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire appropriate railway iconography and the movie coach borrowed from the exhibition practices of the past, travelling in the movie coach was a new experience for the passenger-​spectator.

Inside the Cinema Train On June 3, 1935, during Britain’s holiday season, the LNER and British Pathé unveiled the improved movie coach. The cinema was attached to the 10.10am down train to Leeds, and the 3.15pm up train to London.81 Throughout May, the national press publicised the train’s impending launch. The 1924 film coach (the ‘experiment’ that spawned the 1935 model) was forgotten in both newspaper reports and the public imagination and the mobile newsreel theatre, like other everyday spaces (including the hair salon and bar), was made anew by LNER. The Railway Gazette announced that ‘LNER is cooperating with Pathé Pictures Limited and Pathé Equipment Limited in providing a cinematograph van, fully equipped for exhibiting sound films’.82 The joint venture between the rail and film companies introduced the public to a seemingly ‘new’ concept that was established by old firms. As customers were familiar with both the LNER and British Pathé, two recognisable brands that assured quality in their respective fields, the cinema train offered passengers a novelty without risk –​a strategy that proved successful for both parties. The cinema train guaranteed British Pathé a regular audience, and the LNER likely used statistics about daily passenger returns on long-​distance routes to select a profitable service on which to run the new coach. Inside the train, the promise of an hour’s entertainment was a sure way to lure in customers, as Jeffrey Richards contends that ‘[c]‌inema-​going was indisputably the most popular form of entertainment in Britain in the 1930s.’83 As rail companies were looking to increase revenue from the leisure industry, film screenings made economic sense. Richards’s figures attest that ticket sales at movie theatres in Britain were 917 million in 1936.84 This was in a country with a total population under 47 million in 1935.85 Hence innovations in cinema technologies were vital to the growing entertainment industry. 203

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From Steam to Screen The movie coach was also predicated on an existing alliance between newsreel companies and the railways. Travellers were used to the presence of film theatres at major train stations, where the news was available to people on screen, as well as on paper. ‘Cinemas at train stations have for some time been an accomplished fact’, wrote the Manchester Guardian. ‘Now they have invaded the trains themselves’.86 The Secretary of State for the Dominions, J H Thomas (whose presence signified the perceived importance of the new technology in projecting Britain’s progress to the empire), attended the coach’s inauguration. At the ceremony, Thomas congratulated the LNER for ‘another great improvement in railway travelling’.87 A ‘remarkable achievement for the times’, the cinema train was nonetheless an ‘improvement’, rather than an innovation.88 In his speech, Thomas also referred to the coach as an ‘experiment’  –​which suggests a discontinuity in development between the 1924 and 1935 projects. Nevertheless, his speech posited Britain as a leader in entertainment and travel technologies on a global stage, with his position in government guaranteeing him an international audience. To further emphasise the cinema train’s role in promoting British power to the empire, inside the carriage, guests watched a patriotic film celebrating the monarchy in a short item about George V’s recent jubilee.89 Thomas’s speech was filmed by British Pathé and included in a newsreel bulletin, Cinema on Train (1935). Records do not indicate when the clip was screened, or whether the item was shown on the movie coach’s own programme. The short film, however, is one of only two surviving films in the public domain of the LNER-​Pathé carriage. The clip shows the coach’s exterior, on which wooden panels replaced windows; a programme board was placed to the right of the door. ‘LNER-​Pathe Cinema’ was painted above the entrance.90 While the inclusion of the item in newsreel sequences enabled British Pathé to advertise their new venture, it is newspaper publicity that now provides details about the carriage’s interior, as it was likely too dark to film inside the space. Journalists were invited on the cinema train’s trial run between London and Peterborough in May 1935 and extolled the cinema train’s virtues as a signifier of modernity and Britain’s continuing innovation; mobile screens made the railway relevant in an age increasingly dominated by other, 204

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire newer media and transport technologies. The film carriage, a converted passenger coach and brake van, was identified by Kinematograph Weekly as a ‘converted Pullman’, a name that denoted luxury to passengers.91 The irony that both British Pathé, a company with French antecedents, and Pullman, an American business, were instrumental in British innovation appears to have gone unnoticed (or was at least ignored). In the cinema, ‘two thirds of the space [was] equipped as an auditorium, and the remaining third utilised as the projecting room’.92 Newsreels were screened using a Pathé-​Natan 17.5 millimetre rear projector.93 The coach’s organisation differed from that in the 1924 film coach, which used a forward-​facing projector (located at the rear), and a screen (positioned at the front).94 Passengers sat in the middle, where ‘[b]‌etween the box and the screen there was sufficient room to seat about twenty people comfortably.’95 The design changes wrought in the 1935 cinema train expanded the seating area to accommodate forty-​four people, with standing room at the back for a further six spectators.96 The walls were covered in silver panelling and the space replicated a traditional movie theatre with raked ‘tip-​up’ seats that sloped down towards the screen.97 One reporter described the luxurious accommodation as ‘effectively insulated to cope with outside noises,’ and ‘beautifully decorated in approved cinema style,’ with the projectionist using non-​flammable film to prevent fires.98 The two key problems faced by the designers for the 1924 coach –​darkness and picture oscillation –​were overcome by 1935 by way of a sprung carriage and a ground-​glass screen.99 The décor in the film carriage, with its silver-​panelled walls, was congruent with the opulence on display in contemporary British ‘picture palaces’ (see Figure 5.1). For example, at the new Odeon’s grand opening in Bolton, spectators were greeted by liveried officers, bagpipe music, ‘gold paint, flowers [and] a bit of luxury’.100 The theatre in the train was designed to match, if not exceed, the level of comfort in more traditional cinema auditoriums. British Pathé constructed the furniture in-​house, the company having expanded its furnishings division in the mid-​1930s, when Pathé chairs were installed in ‘public institutions, concert halls, and borough councils’, as well as movie theatres.101 The company’s design experience suggests the cinema coach was furnished to at least the same standard as other public spaces supplied by Pathé. The LNER, too, was known for 205

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From Steam to Screen

Figure 5.1  Passengers wait for a show to start in the silver-panelled LNER-

Pathé movie coach, c.1937. Image courtesy of the National Railway Museum.

the  comforts incorporated in its train services. Engineering drawings for a new 1937 LNER restaurant car illustrate bottle-​holders, service bells and coat hooks all arranged to complement the diner’s experience.102 Double-​ glazing, swivel chairs and plump footstools also awaited customers, and were set between wooden partitions for added privacy.103 The Railway Gazette described the dining coach, asserting that ‘every point affecting the traveller’s comfort has been studied both for ease in dining and relaxation.’104 The newsreel carriage, an innovation designed to encourage both old and new customers to part with their money, was surely finished to excellent standards. The two companies involved were staking their reputations on the cinema train’s success in a highly publicised campaign: it is unlikely that the coach’s internal layout was left open to criticism. Both partners had an interest in producing an exceptional design. However, we can infer from descriptions of the silver panelling and raked seats that British Pathé was responsible for the interior elements. While the LNER boasted 206

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire a certain luxury inside the company’s trains, the finish was understated. Wooden panels adorned walls but retained their original colour; teak-​ framed seats were covered in patterned plum or blue fabrics.105 The effect suggested domesticity rather than theatrical splendour. It is also evident from extant photographs of the carriage’s interior (see Figure 5.1) that the LNER’s standard white ceiling was replaced in the movie coach. A white interior surface would have reflected the films above the audiences’ heads –​ a distracting occurrence in an already less-​than-​perfect auditorium –​so a darker, non-​reflective paint was likely chosen. Of course, while the designers’ attempts to emulate a cinema auditorium were more exactly realised than in 1924, new difficulties arose for passenger-​spectators navigating the repurposed space. One problem was preventing external noise in ‘a train travelling at speeds up to 85 miles an hour’ from ‘muffling the sounds of the films.’106 W J Gell, who was involved in both the 1924 and 1935 movie coach projects, also acknowledged that the seating and ventilation required attention, although he claimed these issues did not detract from the overall experience.107 Moreover, a reporter from the Manchester Guardian did not bemoan sitting with his back to the engine on the outward journey.108 Rather, he noted that ‘[f]‌ar stranger did it seem to be standing, because the apparatus was playing “God Save the King,” while the train hurtled along at seventy miles an hour’.109 Passengers therefore experienced problems when cinematic and rail spaces collided: for example, noise leaked in, while heat could not be let out, and a tradition within the auditorium was out of place inside the train. Despite these problems, the cinema train received favourable reviews, with one journalist for the Aberdeen Journal declaring that the railway movie theatre was just as comfortable ‘as sitting in a West End picture theatre.’110 The LNER likely found success with their Pathé coach for two reasons. First, the newsreel programme offered a varied show: each item was short in duration so the passenger-​spectators’ attention was not lost. Second, the 1935 incarnation of the film carriage included sound, with the technological advancement in cinematic apparatus helping interpolate the audience in a theatrical experience. The movie coach was no longer silent except for the noise of the train:  instead, the auditorium was filled with diegetic sounds that accompanied what happened on the screen. In keeping 207

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From Steam to Screen with the LNER’s reputation for maintaining high standards, a 1938 film programme for the movie coach advertised ‘a comfortable and luxurious cinema attached to this train’.111 The cinema space, then, was distinct from the rest of the train not only in function but also in its theatre-​like design. That the cinema auditorium and the train already shared characteristics helped in this endeavour, for both operated in similar ways: they were democratising spaces in that travel (whether physical or vicarious) was opened up to the masses. Anyone was a potential customer and was able to purchase a rail or movie ticket. And both locations also offered a variety of seats at different prices. On the one hand, the film carriage actually offered greater inclusivity as a rail and cinema space because it eliminated tiered-​price seating, thus offering an economic incentive to attract as many customers as possible from a range of classes. Any passenger from any class could pay for entry at the same cost, with a ticket priced at one shilling, which was a fee maintained into the late 1930s.112 Yet on the other, while the cinema coach did not discriminate between passengers from different class accommodation on the train, the ticket was inflated from the national average for ordinary cinemas, which in 1937 was ten pence (a shilling was equivalent to twelve pence).113 While the price remained close to constant for both static and mobile screenings, the above-​average entry price for the film carriage, for a newsreel programme with no main feature, would have attracted a middle-​ class audience on a good income with money to spare for entertainment. Hence the movie coach remained a hierarchal space overall, which privileged customers with disposable incomes despite the non-​class-​specific seating arrangement. To enter the cinema carriage, passengers had to walk through the train to the end coach. A feature in the Observer offered an account of the process, which was overseen by a Mr Stanley, who advertised the programme to travellers, catered to their needs in the auditorium, and selected films from the programme to project for particular audiences, such as holidaymakers (see Figure 5.2).114 The reporter documented how on the journey: A uniformed attendant comes along the corridor –​‘Any more for the Cinema Car’ –​takes your shilling, hands out tickets.

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire You make your way through the swaying coaches, through an empty guard’s van, push aside a heavy curtain. With the train getting up speed in its eighty mile-​an-​hour sprint through the fen country you find yourself in the oddest little cinema in the world.115

Inside the auditorium, newsreels ran for an hour and followed a routine pattern consisting of ‘news, interest and short films’.116 Attendants were on hand to sell tickets and announce the upcoming programme.117 A typical audience in the newsreel coach comprised businessmen, who found the screenings a ‘useful antidote to business cares and worries’ on regular trips, alongside small children, Salvation Army officers, and holidaymakers.118 Businessmen –​regular, if not daily, commuters –​‘never fail[ed]’ to attend the shows on their journeys, pointing to the cinema train’s enduring appeal and repeat patronage, which transformed the experience from the novel to the everyday. For parents and minders, the Hull Daily Mail reported that the service also had great value ‘in helping to keep children quiet during the train journey.’119 Such was the coach’s success that on November 23, 1935, the cinema train celebrated its 1,000th screening: in

Figure 5.2  A cinema attendant (possibly Mr Stanley) sells tickets for an

LNER-Pathé cinema carriage screening inside the train, c.1937. Image courtesy of the National Railway Museum. 209

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From Steam to Screen just five months, the movie coach had travelled 63,000 miles and received a total audience of over 16,000 people.120 Indeed, the film carriage proved so popular that, in 1936, two further LNER-​Pathé carriages were installed on new routes between London, Leeds and Edinburgh.121 In the same year, Pathé announced in Kinematograph Weekly that the coming of the cinema train was ‘an event in screen history’.122 To accompany the inauguration of the new service, British Pathé recorded a news item in which the Lord Mayor stated that ‘for the second time in the world’s history, this train is to embrace a mobile cinema theatre’.123 In stressing the word ‘this,’ the Lord Mayor specifically referred to the LNER service having a cinema carriage for the second time, yet his framing it in ‘the world’s history’ simultaneously deployed hyperbolic rhetoric that aggrandised the nation’s technological progress. The cinema train continued to internationally advertise Britain’s technological prowess when, in 1937, the Belgian King became the coach’s first royal visitor.124 Accompanied by the Belgian Queen Mother and other dignitaries, including the British Princess Royal and the Duke and Duchess of Kent, King Leopold ‘paid his shilling, the regular price of admission, and entered the Pathé cinema car’.125 To mark the occasion, the newsreel programme featured a clip of the Belgian King inspecting his troops. Leopold, seeing himself on screen, reportedly turned to his mother to ask ‘[d]‌id you see me just then?’ in a moment of self-​referential inspection.126 The royal celebrity guest inadvertently promoted the movie coach, while the film carriage advertised British modernity on a global stage. According to the daily press, the cinema train was internationally renowned, with even American passengers who had visited their domestic railway movie theatres speaking ‘with enthusiasm of our home enterprise.’127 By the time King Leopold visited the cinema train, the film carriage was two years old and still attracting enough patrons that the movie theatre remained a viable business, with the LNER-​Pathé coaches having screened approximately 12,000 newsreel shows.128 However, not all cinematic transformations were successful. One project that did not come to fruition was the LMS’s cinema-​dining car.129 In 1937, a report from the Research Department in the Engineering Section mooted a proposal that harked back to the idea in La lanterna that a movie coach could exist alongside a 210

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire dining carriage.130 The report stated that ‘[i]‌n order to provide an illusion of travel to the occupants of a stationary dining car various schemes for projecting cinematograph films have been considered’.131 The coach was likely to be located at a station, as an electricity supply was necessary to power both the kitchen and cinema facilities. Bruno, analysing the earlier invocation of the cinema train and dining car, argues that consuming images and food are similar, as both are ‘positioned on the threshold of interior/​exterior’.132 The LMS project conflated both actual and imaginary pleasures, and positioned passenger-​spectators in a space that emulated the outside by transforming the inside. The convergence of the cinema and diner not only registered tensions between the inside and outside, but also elitist and inclusive spaces. Passengers that frequented dining cars were visible consumers in a hierarchical public space; spectators in darkened cinemas discretely consumed the visual in a communal environment. Ordinary railway and cinema sites already offered the experience proposed in the LMS report, albeit with more limited choices of passing landscapes. That the report referred to the carriage as an ‘attraction’ and an ‘exhibit’ points to the company’s experimental agenda –​but unlike the LNER’s cinema train, a prototype was never revealed.133 LNER’s 1935 partnership with British Pathé was likely popularised because it anticipated a change in viewing habits that the LMS coach did not address. Newsreels typically were shown prior to features in traditional cinemas, so audiences were accustomed to consuming visual news. However, British film producer Jeffrey Bernerd lamented the fact the news was ‘often regarded as a fill-​up’ in a 1935 article for Kinematograph Weekly, and he predicted that the newsreel would become ‘a decided “feature”.’134 Indeed, the 1937 Bernstein report (an extensive audience survey conducted at Sidney Bernstein’s chain of cinemas) found that cinemagoers wanted more newsreels.135 Film’s role in facilitating communication was by this time recognised by the state (for example, the government adopted cinema as a medium to disseminate propaganda in the First World War), religious groups and political parties.136 While newsreels were not as popular as feature films, the short documentaries enabled people to see events that previously were confined to print. The mobile film theatre introduced an alternate news source, and the consumption 211

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From Steam to Screen of information was as crucial to the coach’s success as entertainment and travel. Watching the news was no longer a preamble to a Hollywood musical, or a way to pass the time at a train station. Mobile newsreels transformed the experience into an activity conducted by both adults and children, and Bernerd foresaw a time when the newsreel would be as popular as the main picture. The newsreel companies in the 1930s promoted their products in print and yet distanced themselves from the obvious political stance taken by newspapers. At one end of the spectrum the Daily Mail was conservative, or right wing, in its approach, while at the other, the Manchester Guardian, with its working-​class roots, was biased to the left. The newsreel purported to be more objective, which harked back to the Illustrated London News’s regular wartime feature discussed in Chapter Two: ‘The Camera as Correspondent’.137 The implication was that the camera was a neutral observer not prone to the same bias as the subjective human. British Movietone posited the same argument in 1935, when Gerald F Sanger, the company’s editor, announced that propaganda was ‘banned’ from the company’s output.138 He stressed that ‘British Movietone News never has and never will abuse its influence as a news publishing medium to distort the significance of events or to give them propagandist flavour’.139 Newsreel producers insisted that filmic representations of the news were more accurate, and thus more authentic, than print. Furthermore, the newsreel was imbued with an immediacy that rivalled the newspaper: images recorded on any given day might be edited and distributed within hours. The cinema train lent the news even greater urgency, with bulletins available to watch on the journey to or from work. That newsreel theatres invaded both stations and trains was evidence of a growing appetite for onscreen news. Yet while the newsreel gained in popularity throughout the 1930s, evidence to support Sanger’s assertions was not forthcoming. And the newsreels, for all the producers’ representations to the contrary, were as politically biased as any report in print. In 1926, the Daily Mail argued that film provided effective propaganda ‘for the economic prosperity of the country [… and] also for its prestige.’140 The article suggested that a ‘lack of British films [would be] most detrimental to the prosperity and delight of Great Britain abroad’.141 Newsreels were 212

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire crucial to British interests because the films offered subjective accounts about actual events; yet the films were marketed as objective. That the state did not intervene in onscreen news censorship for seven days after a clip’s initial screening further bolstered the suggestion that the newsreel provided unbiased reporting.142 However, newsreel producers had both personal and political agendas that were likely to influence the companies’ films. In the interwar period, the newsreel production units were dominated by leaders connected to political groups: the Topical Budget distribution controller, the head of Gaumont-British, the director of Pathé, and, indeed, Gerald Sanger at British Movietone News, were all affiliated with the Conservative Party.143 British Pathé‘s newsreels inside the cinema train perhaps unsurprisingly supported a conservative ideology, and devoted programming to stories about the empire, industry, and Britain’s modernity congruent with the newsreel producers’ political persuasions. A flyer advertising the newsreel programme dated May 16, 1938, is the only extant evidence detailing a LNER-​Pathé film carriage screening (see Figure 5.3). The document lists all thirty-​seven films ‘compiled exclusively for this train by Pathé Gazette’.144 The selection commenced screening on a Monday in mid-​May, indicating a weekly, or bi-​weekly, programme rotation. The date on the surviving programme is not imbued with any particular significance (the cinema train was still three weeks from its anniversary) and the ‘special’ newsreel selection probably refers to the unique location, so the chosen films likely represent a typical screening. The flyer’s materiality made it an ideal souvenir to take home from the film carriage, as a physical remnant of the movie coach alluding to the bodily experience of visiting the space. The individually printed leaflets enabled audience members to share something of their visit with others –​a cheap, yet effective, commodity. For regular patrons, the programme may even have contributed to a collection. One wonders if there are more examples buried in private archives: that only one remains in the National Archives belies the service’s popularity. The leaflet denotes that, by 1938, there were alterations to the film carriage screenings. In 1935, three hour-​long screenings took place on each journey.145 Just three years later, despite the project’s continued success, the timetable indicates just two shows were given (at 1.40 and 3pm on the up 213

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Figure 5.3  An extant programme for the LNER-Pathé cinema train dated

May 1938. Image courtesy of the National Archives.

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire service, and 7.30 and 8.45pm on the down).146 Removing a screening on each journey resulted in losses of up to eighty-​eight shillings (equivalent to four pounds and forty pence in imperial currency) each day. The justification for the decision to reduce performances is not documented in any surviving evidence. However, there are three potential explanations. First, the film carriage was declining in popularity, although this is contrary to contemporary press reports. Second, the screenings’ timings clashed with the train’s own timetable: minutes counted more than frames per second when one was approaching a destination midway through a show, and passengers preparing to exit the train would disrupt the film. But the service was an express one, with few stops. Third, and most probable, is that the longer break offered a practical amendment to the timetable that enabled attendants to clean the theatre and the projectionist to rewind the films between shows. An analysis of the films reveals a programme that now archives contradictions between tradition, empire and hierarchy, and innovation, modernity and inclusivity. The opening item was Their Majesties Tour in Lanarkshire (all films on the programme were produced in 1938), in which the royal couple were filmed on a visit to Scotland.147 In the film, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth watch the production of steel plates in a factory. Molten metal spills from vast furnaces and machines continuously whir. The Queen then ‘works the lever that starts one of the machines,’ cutting steel ‘like scissors cutting paper’, demonstrating the manufacturing processes that made Britain prosper. The visit keeps Scotland ‘proud and happy’ –​happy, no doubt, to boost its international reputation as a producer of raw materials, as well as the country’s tourism industry through association with the royal family. The second item, New Berth for Bananas, takes the audience on a tour around a new merchant ship bound for the West Indies. The camera, panning and tilting upward, mimics the machine that rotates and lifts the imported bananas as if to proclaim the film’s own imperial credentials. Towards the end of the sequence, the footage speeds up to signify the rapidity with which the naval technology works, while the newsreader’s overt racism towards colonised subjects establishes Britain’s imagined superiority and sets the nation apart from a nation it relies upon for produce. As in the first film, the second one posited Britain on a world 215

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From Steam to Screen stage and referred to the country’s industrial growth, while also alluding to imperial supremacy. In New Berth for Bananas, mass production is represented on screen as benefiting the whole nation. But while Britain reaps the rewards of international trade, the film fails to acknowledge the exploitation on which the transaction is predicated. Within the thirty-​seven news items on the programme, some 36 per cent feature new technologies. Other prevalent themes included transport (24 per cent), industry (21 per cent), and social changes (18 per cent). Three films explored Adolf Hitler’s activities in Europe. New German Ambassador in London was the most serious and anachronistic of the three, depicting the ambassador’s arrival at Buckingham Palace in a State Landau, where the King received him ‘in the white and gold throne room’. Here, traditional British pomp was displayed for a foreign visitor.148 Hitler in Italy and Italians Goose-​Step for Hitler, meanwhile, treated the leader with humorous contempt.149 In the latter feature, the Italian army marches through Rome on display for their guest. Hitler’s imposition in the ancient city is signified through the juxtaposition between mounted guns rolling past ancient monuments, including the Colosseum. ‘If he [the marching soldier] don’t do it right, chop his head off!’ the newsreader exclaims, neutralising external threats to British power with comedy. That three films featured Hitler, and five concerned Italy, alludes to ongoing political anxieties about the potential for war in Europe. Thus the newsreel was not providing objective information, but rather news with a marked agenda, which also inflected French Liner Ablaze at Le Havre.150 Aerial shots taken from a plane above a gutted ship granted the clips journalistic authority over both the landscape and the developing story. From a bird’s-​eye perspective, the British were literally looking down on France. The newsreader also refers to the ‘hoodoo of fire’ that has engulfed other French ships in recent months, implying that France’s naval hopes are cursed; as the country is dealt ‘another staggering blow,’ Britain’s own military, passenger and merchant ships (as evidenced in New Berth for Bananas) remain unharmed, and also unrivalled. Even the items on the programme that focused on innovation were committed to a nationalistic cause. In Ninety-​Four Years Old Mrs Anne Budd Takes Her First Flight, Britain was represented as having both a traditional 216

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire past (the ninety-​four-​year-​old woman) and also the desire to adopt new technologies (through flight).151 The film carriage had emerged from modernity’s facilitation of media, speed and machines, and these were themes that dominated the programme’s stories about Britain. For example, New Defence Balloons and Demonstration of Kay Autogyro at Southampton showcased new technologies.152 The autogyro that featured in Demonstration of Kay Autogyro at Southampton had a top speed of one hundred miles per hour, and gave ‘the sort of demonstration that proves the future is in the air’.153 If the autogyro (or helicopter) was the future, then Britain was designing and manufacturing it. The Emotion Machine, however, featured a contraption invented outside Britain at the University of Turin.154 The film reported that scientists claimed to record human emotion using various instruments that measured a subject’s response to loud noises, which were graphically displayed as an oscillating line on a rotating drum. While the film strayed outside Britain for its topic, the sequence touched on a modern fascination for mediating interiors externally (as did Model House, which filmed the interior of a doll’s house). In The Emotion Machine, human feeling was registered on a graph; thus the invisible was rendered visible. The cinema train itself was a medium through which passenger-​spectators received the news, with the outside world represented inside the train, and the cinema auditorium’s interior mediated through an exterior railway space. Hence The Emotion Machine referred to that same threshold between inside and outside, public and private, which resided within the movie coach. Aside from The Emotion Machine and two sporting items, the programme set its sights firmly on British invention.155 While Britain made steel, designed new transport and improved its military capabilities, the nation’s foreign counterparts were shown in rural idylls. For example, Blessing the Lambs in Italy follows a spring procession that culminates with villagers in traditional peasant costume carrying lambs on decorative floats and Dublin Spring Show focuses on livestock and agriculture at the city’s fair.156 The films demonstrated that, compared to rivals who were stuck in the past, Britain was a leading global power, which countered negative discourses (for example, about economic depression) that implied the nation’s industrial decline. The programme’s final section was given over to travelogues and entertainment items. Whereas the earlier films had a technological emphasis 217

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From Steam to Screen that vicariously referred to the cinema train’s own part in Britain’s modernity, the travel items were more obviously designed to sell the railway experience. Both Troy Town and Novelties were moving image guidebooks that respectively transported the audience to Cornwall and York.157 Architecture, wildlife and history were all addressed in these brief cinematic tours. The films’ spectators figuratively visited the locations on the train as they watched the films, and might actually travel to the destinations by railway. The cinema train was not only used to promote tourism through innovation, but also through the films screened inside the space. Any passengers enticed into the LNER-​Pathé carriages as holidaymakers soon found themselves invited to part with their money on the railway for a third time –​having already paid to use the train and the railway cinema.

The Cinema Train’s Afterlife Aside from the 1938 programme, and some brief references in the daily press, the mobile railway cinema disappeared by 1939, when the last extant report about the film carriage announced a special service for boy scouts visiting Scotland.158 Like other LNER projects, including the cocktail bars and hair salons, the cinema train was probably discontinued in 1939 at the war’s outbreak. The bodily experience of watching and moving while simultaneously in a cinema and a train was a manifestation of modernity and indicative of contemporary British preoccupations with technology. The mobile newsreel theatres also altered the ways people connected with the world: inside film carriages passengers might leave aside their newspapers to watch, rather than read, current affairs. But as the country went back to war, entertainment media –​including inventions like the film carriage –​were forgotten. Two rail companies did continue using movie coaches throughout the Second World War. One was built in a converted London and South Western Railway (LSWR) passenger coach.159 The other was launched in 1940. Designed by Southern Railway, the latter film carriage had a more utilitarian function than its LNER predecessors. The brown exterior was made from riveted metal sheets, while the interior featured plain white walls, exposed electric bulbs and cloth-​covered benches.160 A  portable projector screened moving images from the aisle beside the seats.161 While 218

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire the movie coach was still a propaganda machine, the space was no longer used to promote British modernity, tourism and leisure. Instead, the railway film theatre was operated as a communication device that helped train staffs cope with the national emergency. The SR cinema carriage travelled the country showing training films to railway workers, sharing more in common with the Russian agit-​train than the LNER-​Pathé models. One reporter described how: Members of the Barnstaple Junction Railway staff and friends were entertained at intervals on Tuesday by some splendid films of the Southern Railway Home Guard ‘in action’. The films were projected in a specially equipped cinema van –​originally built for instructional purposes throughout the Southern Railway system. With the outbreak of war the Company conceived of the idea of filming its own Home Guard activities and showing the results to the staffs throughout the country.162

Like the agit-​train, the SR cinema train gave static performances; mobile screenings were impossible in an auditorium with a portable projector, due to oscillation. The movie coach, changed from a recreational space into an educational one, was part of a shift that saw the railways enter public service in Britain. During the war, the government assumed control over Britain’s private railway companies. In 1947, the government passed the Transport Act, which nationalised the railways and dissolved the once private train companies (due in part to the infrastructure’s role in serving the nation’s mining industry) with effect from 1948. Also in 1948, the government implemented the Beveridge Report and transformed the leisure industries by establishing the British Tourist and Holidays Board to attract foreign tourists through a coherent, national marketing campaign.163 Economic competition, the rail companies’ incentive for improving services, disappeared. With it went the technological advancements that distinguished the 1920s and the hybrid functionality that sped up life in the 1930s. While the cinema train was by no means redundant (the technology was used in Britain until 1989), the movie coach’s significance as a leisure space was depleted on a rail network that valued efficiency over entertainment. 219

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From Steam to Screen However, the trains that housed moving images were revisited on screen in two post-​war movies, and thus the vehicle was given a post-​war afterlife. Both the 1945 Brief Encounter and 1948 Letter from an Unknown Woman examine the interconnections between railway passengers and cinematic viewers: the films both reinvented the passenger-​spectator and self-​reflexively archived cinema’s own obsolete practices.164 The movies explore railway spaces that double as auditoriums, and focus on the same thresholds that characterised actual cinema trains. In Brief Encounter, Laura and Alec, the film’s protagonists, first meet at a rail cafe and thereafter embark on an affair, during which they meet at the station, in restaurants and at a movie theatre. Their relationship is based on consumption: they buy rail and cinema tickets, eat food, watch films, hire cars and listen to barrel organ music. On two occasions the couple argue as to who will pay the bill, each insisting they will pay their share. Both the moving image and rail transport are luxuries afforded by middle-​class customers with spare income –​precisely the audience targeted by the LNER-​Pathé cinema train. The film thus depicts the thriving leisure industry that existed before, rather than during, the war. A mutation of the cinema carriage is represented as part of the film’s nostalgia for pre-​war British culture. Laura and Alec kiss in the subway beneath the station’s platforms and Laura runs to catch her train, with her affectionate partings from Alec taking place underground, beneath polite society and in relative privacy. Yet as Laura sits in a carriage on her way home, she externalises the feelings about her situation that she typically represses in a cinematic display that crosses the threshold between public and private. She looks through the window to her left and her face appears doubled within the frame, as her image is reflected in the glass (see Figure 5.4). Laura stares beyond her translucent image at the passing scenery –​the telegraph poles and wires that Wolfgang Schivelbusch identified as mediating the natural landscape.165 She then projects onto this moving imagery her visual fantasies. There are four layers imposed one on top of the other in front of her: the window; her reflection; the landscape; and her dreams. Laura’s animated musings are not only externalised on the train window/​screen, which is reminiscent of the window/​screen in The Lady Vanishes, but are also thrown out into the world and exposed on the passing countryside.166 In the fantasy sequence, Laura and Alec waltz beneath a chandelier, 220

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire

Figure 5.4  Laura in Brief Encounter (Cineguild, 1945) stares at both the

passing landscape and her image as it is projected onto the carriage window, which recalls the function of the cinema train. visit an opera in Paris, and take a gondola ride in Venice. Their private relationship is simultaneously screened for all to see and yet visible only to Laura, which is indicative of both the train and the cinema’s propensity to offer an individualised experience in a communal space. In voiceover, Laura describes how ‘I saw us travelling far away together to all the places I’ve longed to go’. Hence her projection is like the travelogue in the cinema train: it offers a kind of tourism that is not real, but vicarious. Andrew Thacker, in his analysis of modernity in literature, contends that we need to ‘consider how the interiority of psychic space is […] profoundly informed by exterior social spaces.’167 The cinema train –​in actuality a space that exposed the thresholds between the public and private –​is here the means by which Laura externalises her internal thoughts. She is both a passenger and a spectator, travelling home while watching the window/​screen. Laura’s experience in this illusory film carriage makes her a tourist in her own fantasy. When the couple watch films together, Laura 221

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From Steam to Screen always looks to her left to speak to Alec, just as she turns to the window in the carriage. Her physical relationship both to Alec and the image of their imagined future suggests the relationship is no more likely to last than the fantasies projected on the cinema screen, which always come to an end. Because passenger-​spectators were invited to substitute the real for the imaginary, and the interior for the exterior, the cinema train encouraged awkward viewing positions that had the potential to confuse passenger-​ spectators. Consequently, Laura falls victim to the technology’s illusory powers and cannot separate her internalised fantasy from the external reality. Alec is not party to Laura’s imaginary movie coach experience, and it is his practical outlook that ends their affair; even after they have parted, she cannot help but go back to look for him one last time, perpetuating the illusion that he will return. Letter from an Unknown Woman, set in fin de siècle Vienna, more explicitly archives the railway cinema for British audiences through its representation of a primitive attraction not unlike Hale’s Tours. While the film does not specifically refer to a British model of movie coach, like Brief Encounter the sequence exposes the tensions between fantasy and reality that permeate cinematic railway spaces. Lisa, the ‘unknown woman’, visits the mock-​rail carriage with her lover, Stefan. The couple sit inside a compartment and watch painted scenes of European landmarks scroll past their window. The rotating cyclorama, which is reminiscent of nineteenth-​ century panoramas, is selected by pulling levers borrowed from a signal box, and is powered by an old man pedalling a bike. The attraction creates the illusion of luxurious travel –​however, the proto-​cinematic train is troubled by the very tricks that make it function. The space promises new sights and so commoditises vision, and yet, like the cinema trains, also borrows from nascent technologies (such as the bicycle and the panorama). The device is new, but also old, and the onscreen carriage uneasily hovers on the threshold between public and private space. For example, Lisa is thrilled to be outside, associating with Stefan in public, and when the couple are inside the train, anyone might invade their private space (indeed, if this were a 1930s British railway drama, someone invariably would). However, the coach belongs to them alone, for Stefan has paid for the couple’s solitude. Thus the proto-​cinematic train relies on illusion. Lisa 222

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire is deceived by the space’s simultaneous public and private function, and while Stefan sees the contraption’s cogs and levers, he never reveals the machination to her. In both Brief Encounter and Letter from an Unknown Woman the movie coach only figuratively takes the passenger-​spectators for a ride, but even inside the actual cinema train, movement was vicarious and vision was mediated. Therefore, while to my knowledge no extant footage remains of the movie coaches’ interiors, the passengers’ experiences of watching films inside trains are archived in these two motion pictures. In representing the hybrid space, the films self-​referentially explore the cinema and the train’s convergent histories on screen. Brief Encounter and Letter from an Unknown Woman capture the conflicting sensations of motion and stasis, and the old and the new, which were described by reporters who travelled in actual movie coaches. Thus both films preserve for audiences today the experience of simultaneously being passengers and spectators. For audiences in the post-war period there were limited opportunities to visit actual movie coaches. For example, the SR film carriage continued to distribute educational films for British Rail staffs, and two further coaches were added to the rolling stock. The first was a converted LMS coach, the second (built in 1955) was an old GWR dining saloon.168 But the new railway auditoriums remained static during screenings and both coaches were hired out for events (such as corporate functions, or railway advertising), rather than regular passenger services. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, critics voiced concerns about the movie coaches’ viability. In 1958, a British Rail manager complained that the cinema carriage was a drain on resources. He declared that public interest was so small ‘tickets were distributed to all and sundry in order to get some sort of audience.’169 Nevertheless, a third new film carriage, built by British Rail in 1978, was designed once again to project moving images while the train was in motion.170 The network’s decision to create an additional mobile cinema on the railway was perhaps in response to the normalisation of inflight movies on aeroplanes.171 Even in 1978, reintroducing a cinema train onto Britain’s railways was likely to attract publicity, and thus customers, for the rail network; indeed, Princess Margaret was one of the movie coach’s first 223

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From Steam to Screen passengers.172 However, the venture was not successful, and by 1989, all the film carriages were retired from service. While the LNER-​Pathé carriage had garnered large crowds, the British Rail movie coach failed to entice demand. Now, aside from the LNER-​Pathé programme, there is no physical evidence of the early pre-British Rail, LNER movies coaches left. What promised to be ‘an event in screen history’ was all but forgotten by film scholars and historians.173 The cinema train’s failure to survive in post-​ war culture was due in part to its redundancy in austerity Britain –​yet there were other, practical reasons for the space’s declining popularity. Throughout the book, I  have outlined the various ways in which the railway and the moving image’s histories intersected. Both technologies altered the experience of time and space and produced motion that passed by the static passenger/​spectator. Both also relied on one another for business. But the cinema offers virtual movement  –​it is stillness that moves –​and the cinema train provided movement within a mobile space. On the threshold between the cinema and the train the differences between the two were exposed. Journeys in the movie theatre were not the same as those taken by train. Standing to sing the National Anthem (a custom widespread in the cinema) was performed with difficulty in the moving carriage, and the noise from the train was never entirely eliminated from the auditorium. Movie theatres and rail travel both visually mediate the world through windows and screens. Schivelbusch contends that, on the railway, ‘[t]‌he traveller perceived the landscape as it was filtered through the machine ensemble.’174 However, the hybrid space of the film carriage presented a new experience of time and space. Visitors were neither passengers looking through windows, nor spectators travelling through screens, but both. The outside world, always ‘filtered’ by the window and the screen, suddenly appeared to the passenger-​spectator inside the train. Design historian Penny Sparke examines how, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, designers applied strategies from outside architectures to interior spaces.175 The movie coach not only integrated the design of two public spaces, but also supplanted the interior with an exterior,

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire the physical with the psychological. Passenger-​spectators were both inside and out, tourists in two lands. Bruno, in her work on early cinema, contends that moving images ‘provided a form of access to public space’ as viewers vicariously travelled through places explored by the camera.176 In the cinema train, this ‘public space’ was opened up when the film began to play. But the spatial practices associated with the railway also dictated that this was a private space. When in motion, the movie carriage was sealed to the outside world; only those already on board could embark on either the real, or imaginary, journeys that were taking place inside the train. The film carriage was open to the railway’s customers, but once inside, visitors were encouraged to embark on a private journey. Train carriages, divided into compartments, and cinemas, in their darkness, were both social spaces that accommodated an individualised crowd. Private pastimes  –​watching, reading  –​were performed singularly, even as the journey (either imagined in the movies or literal on the railway) was shared. The movie coach existed on the peripheries between public and private, interior and exterior. Passenger-​spectators were thus simultaneously drawn to, and divorced from, the screen: the world was mediated to them through moving images but the moving vehicle interrupted their experience of the film. The film carriage was a liminal space in which the imaginary and the real both figuratively (through the geographies projected on the screen), and materially (through the vehicle-​as-​auditorium) collided. Travelling through real space destroyed, rather than augmented, the passenger-​spectator’s interpolation in the imaginary. Viewers were dis-​located inside the cinema carriage: they could not inhabit the space as either passengers or spectators. Lynne Kirby asserts that ‘[i]‌t is in the spectator/​passenger that the train and the cinema converge most closely, as each creates its tourist, its visual consumer […] out of a fundamental instability.’177 The two technologies mediated one another in the cinema train as viewers travelled through the screen and watched inside the carriage. A literal, if unstable, passenger-​spectator was formulated in this space. But while the movie theatre and the railway coach singularly offer multiple viewing positions to ‘visual consumers’, the cinema train revealed the impossibilities of the experience to its clientele. Moving and watching was simultaneous, but not the same. 225

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From Steam to Screen The 1935 movie coach enabled LNER-​Pathé to determine customers’ views from inside the train. A Kinematograph Weekly journalist visiting the movie coach questioned whether this level of control was necessary. ‘Why not,’ he asked ‘[instead] show glimpses of the beautiful English countryside covered by the route of the train?’178 The writer drew attention to the cinematic quality of the views already on offer through the vehicle’s windows. Motion pictures on trains arbitrated the passenger’s experience of the railway. But carriage windows had already framed exterior landscapes before the introduction of screens.179 Emerging as it did from a long history of mobile screens, the cinema train ultimately was replicating what had gone before. Thus the film carriage’s obsolescence was confirmed not only by the changing cultural landscape, but also the space’s complex response to a new idea that was already old.

Conclusion Britain had posed a Janus figure in the interwar period, for, like the passenger-​spectator, the nation inhabited two worlds  –​one defined by tradition and past glories, the other insistent on progress and technology. The movie coach, one example of the architecture of Britain’s modernity, was destined to become old even as it was made new. Nevertheless, the film carriage spawned other mobile entertainment technologies that continue to resonate in our lives today. Giuliana Bruno argues that the media people consume influence their perceptions of everyday places.180 The cinema train altered railway architecture with moving images and encouraged viewers to travel through motion pictures. Now, the portable media devices passengers carry in their bags enable them to visit those same un-​ mappable spaces that the movie coach presented to passenger-​spectators in early film carriages. Cinema trains could not halt Britain’s decline in a changing political landscape. But the mobile screen lives on, and the convergence between the moving image and the railway continues to impact people’s everyday lives. The cinema, posits Philip Rosen, offers ‘models for other, subsequent media with which it has become intertwined’.181 The ‘subsequent media’ Rosen refers to are televisions and digital devices. Indeed, the film carriage 226

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The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire pre-​empted a spatial convergence of the cinema and the railway that continues into our digital age. Moving images now adorn train station walls where once there were posters. Screens announce departures and arrivals at platforms. Smart phones and tablet computers give us access to mobile motion pictures while we travel  –​albeit as individuals, rather than an individualised crowd. But our digital devices emerge from an established fascination with mobile media, not the forgotten history of the cinema train. I argue the film carriage’s legacy lies instead in the ways we consume information. The 1935 LNER-​Pathé cinema train made visual news consumption exciting, as the film carriage presented the news as a feature in its own right in an unusual setting. And the movie coach also made pictorial news mobile. Writing in the Observer in 1937, a visitor to the mobile auditorium conceived of a time when miniaturised visual media apparatuses would ‘be the carriage companions of every traveller when a passenger […] will be able to fix the world in front of him with a single touch of a switch.’182 His words foreshadowed twenty-​first century technologies and the setting of the news in motion, which enabled newsreel companies (and later television, Internet and other visual news broadcasters) to contest the easily distributed, individually printed, newspaper. Benedict Anderson suggests that the newspaper, ‘one of the earlier-​mass-​produced commodities,’ becomes useless the morning after its printing. This, he argues ‘prefigure[d]‌the inbuilt obsolescence of modern durables.’183 The cinema train inevitably was as ineffective as a daily newspaper. However, the architectural convergence of the railway and the cinema shaped the cultural practices that we continue to perform in our everyday lives, as the movie coach actualised the possibilities for mobile news media consumed by audiences of individuals. The rolling, twenty-​four-​hour news broadcasts that we watch on portable screens have emerged from a history of mobile, visual news reports that began when LNER-​Pathé built a cinema in a rail carriage.

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Epilogue

In the nineteenth century, the train was variously conceived as a monstrous machine (for example, in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son) and also as a technology that was beyond the realms of the scientific.1 The locomotive was a mystical thing that, according to Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem, transported passengers ‘[f]‌aster than fairies, faster than witches’.2 Even in the 1930s, the Daily Mail suggested that the train offered ‘a blissful retreat from reality.’3 Similarly, early cinema was conceived as a medium that brought the dead back to life in shadowy apparitions. Maxim Gorky described the ‘curses and ghosts [and] evil spirits’ that inhabited the images projected on screen as ‘terrifying to watch.’4 Later, during the First World War, the film camera was depicted in popular culture as a scientific instrument that surpassed humans’ abilities to observe the truth.5 Thus the two technologies evoked the modern, as well as the sublime, and helped shape what one commentator called ‘Britain’s most “spacious times.”’6 As this book has demonstrated, the converging histories of the railway and the moving image both registered, and contributed to, transformations of space in British culture. Through five chapters exploring diverse examples of people’s encounters  with trains and cinema, this book has archived changes to time 229

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From Steam to Screen and space wrought by the railway and the moving image. First, my examination of convergences between the two technologies has exposed tensions between how public and private space, and inclusivity and hierarchy, affected how intersecting groups of people interacted with the world around them. Second, the research has uncovered not only specific historical narratives about the train and the cinema’s machinated spatiality, but also the connections between the technologies and the nation’s wider social, political and economic concerns in the period. Third, my work has combined material evidence and conceptual analysis in order to provide readers with a feminist framework for understanding and challenging preconceived, patriarchal notions about mass consumption. The book, therefore, frames discourses about motion and vision, public and private space, and inclusivity and hierarchy, in an investigation into the specific, material changes to everyday life brought about by the railway and the cinema. Both the train and moving images transformed in tangible ways how people moved through and looked out on the world as either actual or vicarious tourists. In doing so, the research has contributed to scholarship on how visual and kinetic technologies intervened in everyday life for different groups of people. As well as examining specific instances in which rail and cinema technologies intervened in daily life, the book has also established connections between trains, films and Britain’s broader historical trajectory. On screen, the railway was a metaphor not only for modernity, but also for anxieties about people’s transformed experiences of space and time. Furthermore, there are physical connections between the technologies and wider narratives about British culture. For example, in Chapter Five, ever-​more luxurious trains, opulent picture palaces, and a simultaneous increase in films about the railways evidence the nation’s growing entertainment economy in the 1920s and 1930s. The cinema train’s popularity peaked in the late 1930s, with the innovative space a facet of the nation’s self-​projected imperial supremacy. However, by the 1940s, the movie coach was redundant, and reduced to an austere vehicle that functioned as an educational, rather than a leisure-​oriented, site. Hence the historical narrative about intersections between the railways and film is congruent with Britain’s changing economy, and relative decline, in the first half of the twentieth century. 230

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Epilogue The sense of newness conjured by both the railway and cinema was considerably altered by the close of the 1940s. Aeroplanes, automobiles and televisions were transforming how people moved and looked. Television broadcasts offered more immediate visual records of world events than cinema-​bound newsreels, and, more conveniently, were available in the home. Simultaneously, the locomotive’s representation on screen changed in the second half of the twentieth century as road travel was popularised. For in the early 1950s, while the technologies maintained an interwoven history, the narrative was no longer one of modernity but of demolition. Whereas picture palaces and railway stations once ‘annihilat[ed] space and time’, by the mid-​twentieth century, road vehicles and television supplanted them.7 Here, I offer an epilogue that explores how the railway and cinema, which once were transformative technologies that mediated people’s encounters with modernity, were also transformed into vehicles of nostalgia after the Second World War. In doing so, I focus on examples of both actual, and filmic, sites in which the train and cinema collided with newer technologies. Hence the epilogue examines the Festival of Britain, which the government organised to showcase the nation’s alleged post-​war prosperity, and the 1953 Ealing comedy The Titfield Thunderbolt (hereafter, Thunderbolt), which celebrated Britain’s railway, and vicariously the nation’s cinema, heritage.8 In 1951, against the backdrop of continued rationing, labour shortages and post-​war reconstruction, the Festival of Britain was designed to ‘provide a tonic and stimulus to the people of Britain after a decade of danger, fatigue, and austerity’.9 The Festival, which comprised twelve official exhibitions, alongside nearly 2,000 unofficial local events, focused on three themes:  the Land of Britain, the People of Britain, and Britain’s contribution to Discovery.10 Between May 3 and September 30, the nation was (according to official accounts) awash with colour and a newfound sense of purpose.11 The Festival’s objective was ‘to attract the hordes of visitors from abroad,’ to whom the government organisers wished to demonstrate the nation’s ‘resiliency and virility.’12 As such, the event was successful. Foreign visitors to Britain increased by 100,000 between 1950 and 1951, rising to 700,000.13 And at peak levels, the South Bank received 93,012 guests in a single day.14 The objective in the official Festival guidebook to ‘make 231

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From Steam to Screen Britain’s recovery and achievements front-​page news all over the world’ was achieved.15 As part of the Festival, various exhibits showcased new technologies. National exhibitions included the South Bank site, the Pleasure Gardens at Battersea, the newly built Science Museum at Kensington, a Living Architecture site at Poplar and an industry exposition in Glasgow. In addition, a travelling land exhibition visited satellite locations including Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham, and a science-​based collection on the ship Campania toured ports such as Southampton, Dundee and Cardiff.16 However, within the event’s museum spaces, the train was relegated to a museum piece and children’s entertainment, while cinema had a purely educational function. For example, the Transport Pavilion at the main site showcased historical locomotives that made ‘an instant appeal to boys and to men who ha[d]‌not got over the romantic appeal of large-​scale mechanical engineering.’17 That the train was ‘romantic’ suggested its connection to the past, rather than the future, of transport. Moreover, inside the exposition, visitors viewed locomotives and buses at ground level, and a walkway spiralled up through the space until the guests reached the same height as the aeroplanes, from where people looked down on the older machines. Outside, another locomotive was on display and more trains were housed in the Dome of Discovery, where people could further contemplate the railway’s historic role in shaping Britain’s industrial landscape. But such was the nation’s increasing reliance on road transport that even a locomotive destined for display in the Dome of Discovery was delivered on the back of a truck.18 At the Festival’s Pleasure Gardens there were yet more railway-​themed attractions. For example, Peter Pan’s Railway was a funfair ride designed for children that enabled customers to drive the trains.19 For families, the Punch cartoonist Rowland Emett designed a special railroad.20 The ‘Far Tottering and Oyster Creek Railway’ offered passengers a trip aboard a nineteenth century-​style train, and the Pleasure Gardens service linked the Grand Vista with the Fun Fair. The railway’s two locomotives, Hector and Neptune, pulled eight coaches with room for ninety-​six passengers along a circular, looping track between the two destinations.21 The whimsical train ride, like the locomotive museum exhibits, referred to British 232

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Epilogue railway heritage and offered passengers a fantastical, yet safe and comfortable, journey into the past. Emett’s design also directly acknowledged Britain’s literary heritage, for the actual and fictional services alluded to the eccentric passengers, fantastical illustrations, and train with no terminating destination in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass.22 Consequently, the railway provided visitors with a trip down memory lane, while newer forms of transport such as the car, bus, and aeroplane represented the future. Alongside the Festival’s depiction of the purportedly historic railway, cinema was secondary to the event’s media strategy, and was both underfunded and overlooked in favour of television. For instance, owing to financial problems, the designers of the new Science Museum, built especially for the Festival, cut the six planned cinema screens to just one.23 Similarly, the British Film Institute was unable to develop a planned stereoscopic screen at South Bank without financial assistance from Canada.24 And while films were commissioned for both exhibition purposes and to document the event, television coverage was more broadly accessible.25 The Festival’s opening ceremony was recorded as a televisual event that broke the boundaries of previous broadcasts; the opening ceremony marked the first time the British Broadcasting Corporation filmed inside St Paul’s Cathedral, and was more noteworthy (and immediate) than the accompanying cinematic documentation.26 Moreover, where once film distributors transported newsreels across the Atlantic, now television coverage of the event was exported from Britain to the USA. Analogously, Thunderbolt’s buses, trains, and television and film screenings attest to the reconfiguration of British culture around road transport and broadcast media. The film features a remote countryside village that is losing its branch-​line railway to the nearest town owing to competition from a local bus company. When some of the nostalgic villagers, conservatively unwilling to give up the service, decide to continue running the train themselves, the community goes to war, with rail enthusiasts pitted against the bus’s champions. The local vicar, George, backed financially by a local squire, Valentine, leads the railway group in restoring a decommissioned locomotive and carriages, visiting rail museum exhibits, and ultimately saving the Titfield to Mallingford line and thwarting the bus company. 233

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From Steam to Screen In Thunderbolt, the village’s church (represented by clergyman George) and railway are historic sites that are crucial to maintaining community identity. On learning that the local rail service is to cease operations, George declares the authorities ‘can’t close the oldest branch line in the world’. The route’s historical significance is crucial to the local village’s character, and so preservation is necessary to secure Titfield’s future. Moreover, the film consistently reminds audiences about Britain’s national railway heritage. Viewers are informed about nineteenth-​century couplings (which have not been used since 1875); embark on a visual tour of Mallingford Town Hall (which houses both model and full-​size locomotives); and vicariously travel in the historic Thunderbolt engine. Moreover, the locomotive that featured in the film was an actual nineteenth-​century engine named the Lion that was brought out of museum retirement especially for the movie.27 Todd, Kitson and Laird of Leeds built engine No. 57, known informally as the Lion, in 1838, and the locomotive became the oldest engine ever put into service when it was used for the film.28 Thunderbolt thus restored, recycled and preserved what already in 1953 belonged to the past. The film creates a mise-​en-​abyme, in which actual museum pieces are repurposed as film props that feature as museum pieces that are repurposed for the railway. With its legendary local engine and glass-​cased memorabilia, the imaginary Mallingford Museum is the fantasy catalogue created from actual archives; a history preserved on screen. In addition to Thunderbolt’s museum-​piece engines, there are images of historic trains displayed both in George’s house and the engine’s cabin; Dan’s converted carriage home functions as a railway museum space; and there are sequences featuring vehicles already in service on the branch line. Furthermore, the train puffing around the circular track in the opening sequence (which alluded to the Festival of Britain’s Far Tottering Railway) is Richard Trevithick’s Catch Me Who Can. Trevithick’s 1808 system was the first steam-​powered passenger train and was exhibited to the public in Bloomsbury, London.29 The film’s depiction of the train going around in circles foregrounds the locomotive’s historical invention and its exclusion from the future –​for although the villagers are keen to preserve the railway, it will remain the same and not move forward. 234

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Epilogue The film’s contemporary critics remarked that Thunderbolt showed nostalgic tendencies and reverence for a ‘cosy world of railway fancy.’30 Indeed, the picture is both whimsical and fantastical in its depiction of rail history. However, it also archives comedic versions of actual events whereby communities across Britain mourned the closures of branch lines in the face of government cuts. The film’s narrative was based on the experiences of the movie’s writer, T E B Clarke, who visited a railway operated by local volunteers in a Welsh village after the line officially closed.31 And, throughout 1953, the daily press reported numerous stories about other local railways under threat from closure. In one example, The Times reported that a railway faced closure owing to expanding bus services.32 In another, an application for a bus route was turned down in Southend to protect the existing railway.33 The Daily Telegraph also revealed that ‘[t]‌he 422 inhabitants of Shipton-​on-​Cherwell will not lose their railway yet. Local residents protested at the move to shut the 63-​year-​old line.’34 And there were similar remonstrations on the Isle of Wight.35 In all, the national press reported five major line closures in 1953:  as well as on the Isle of Wight there were closures from Kidlington to Blenheim and Woodstock, at Southport, from Bolton to Manchester and along the Waveney Valley line. The closures were met with fierce opposition and in some instances, as on the Isle of Wight, the council was ‘prepared to consider applying for a light railway order to take over and operate branches themselves.’36 Residents affected by the closure of the Waveney Valley service went further still: An oak ‘coffin’ inscribed ‘Waveney Valley Line, aged 97 years. Taken from us 3.1.53’ was carried in the guard’s van from Tivetshall to Harleston. It was borne along the platforms at the two stations on a civic defence stretcher. At frequent intervals the ‘corpse’ flung open the lid and waved to the onlookers [… and] [f]‌ireworks were discharged from the windows at frequent intervals.37

Thunderbolt, therefore, archives an epidemic of railway-​related hysteria that arose from actual fears about expanding bus networks and the government ostensibly planning the train’s obsolescence. 235

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From Steam to Screen The film’s triumphant closing scene features the train’s arrival at Mallingford to a rapturous welcome from professional railway workers. But this was a utopian fantasy not borne out on Britain’s railways. There were accidents, mail train thefts, increased fares and services where ‘local trains [were] frequently in a deplorable state’.38 Branch line closures continued and, from December of 1953, strike action signalled chaos for passengers.39 In a sample of that year’s newspapers, 62 per cent of all railway stories featured crime, accidents, fare rises, falling standards, closures or strikes.40 Thunderbolt, like the Festival of Britain before it, archives a railway that was falling into disrepair, and retrospectively looks back to the nineteenth century when Britain was the global leader in railway engineering. Advocates of the railway yearned for the days when British trains were known for what Wolfgang Schivelbusch calls their ‘advanced mechanization’ and ability to ‘[bring] people together socially and spatially.’41 British Rail were intent on keeping alive tradition, even issuing assurances to the public that station managers would continue to wear top hats on ceremonial occasions.42 As British transport infrastructures changed, the railways increasingly relied on past glory to conceal the network’s decay. In addition to archiving the nation’s railway heritage, Thunderbolt also self-​referentially preserves the cinema, which suffered waning popularity throughout the 1950s. In homage to the railway film genre, Ealing cast Naunton Wayne as the train-​travelling lawyer Blakeworth. Wayne was famous as one half of the onscreen double act Charters and Caldicott, the upper-​class, cricket-​obsessed passengers who first appeared in The Lady Vanishes (1938), and then appeared on a station platform in Night Train to Munich (1940).43 Furthermore, the film narrates television’s rise and the simultaneous decline of both cinemagoing and Ealing Studios. In the movie, the bus owners and their accomplice meet in a pub to discuss their plot to sabotage the railway, and their conversation is intercut with close-​ ups of a nearby television set showing a Western in which the villains are holding up a train. Critic Penelope Houston deplored this trick, arguing that by the time of Thunderbolt’s theatrical release the ‘intramural studio joke ha[d]‌become an irritating convention.’44 However, the framing device moves beyond convention. The trick refers to broadcast media’s negative impact on cinema, with the television’s appearance alluding to the film 236

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Epilogue industry’s anxiety about both the new technology, and the emergence of privately owned commercial channels.45 The TV screen provides medium-​ specific nostalgia for the film audience: Thunderbolt looks back at the history of the moving image just as it looks back at the history of the railway. Like the bus, the television represents progress, and the film attempts to sabotage its popularisation in three ways. First, the television is screening a film –​rather than a made-​for-​television programme –​and it is black and white, compared to Thunderbolt’s garish primary Technicolor.46 As such, the television steals original content at the movie theatres’ expense. Second, the crooks in the televised Western are also the counterparts of the villainous Hawkins and the bus company. The film images playing on the television therefore evoke a threat to a civilised and conservative society rooted in tradition, just like the saboteurs. Third, the television loses signal, demonstrating not only problems with the technology, but also its failure to effectively communicate with audiences. It is no wonder that the filmmakers resisted the coming of television, for by 1959, Ealing ceased production. While there were many contributing factors to cinema’s decline, Charles Barr argues that the studios were ‘obsolete’ when ‘television was taking away [the] audience’.47 As a result, Thunderbolt’s insistence on the railway’s relevance is also a rallying cry for the studio’s own survival and the continuation of cinema. From the 1950s onwards, films such as Thunderbolt, Quadrophenia (1979) and the more recent Harry Potter series (2001–​2011) have depicted trains that are variously old, derelict and nostalgic relics from a past age.48 In Fahrenheit 451 (1966), an elevated monorail supplants the traditional railway, and the old-​fashioned train features only as a domestic space where communities go to escape the progress of the dystopian, fascist government.49 Children of Men (2002) also depicts a dystopian future, in which battered and vandalised British Rail carriages –​old even when the film was made –​suggest that trains are outmoded and associated with the past.50 Meanwhile in the Harry Potter films, the magical Hogwarts Express refers back to a Victorian imagining of the railway as a sublime and otherworldly manifestation. Yet although its private compartments and steam locomotive initially suggest the Hogwarts Express is a cosy throwback to the nineteenth century, it is also a signifier of Britain’s role in conflict, as 237

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From Steam to Screen the site of terrifying interruptions and invasions (vis-​à-​vis the Dementors), and physical assaults carried out by students. Thus, on screen, the railway is no longer a referent for Britain’s particular modernity, but is associated with the nation’s past. In his opening speech at the Festival of Britain, the King remarked that ‘[s]‌pacious times are no more; the island sea is no longer inviolate’.51 While George VI also hoped that Britain might ‘restore and expand’ former territory, his previous comment acknowledged the nation’s depleted spatiality, and so an end to Britain’s particular experience of modernity.52 Space was both demolished at home (with cities destroyed by wartime aerial bombardment) and diminished abroad (as British colonies gained independence).53 The train and the film once were vital technologies in transforming space and time, and so enabled people to experience modernity in material ways. But by the mid-​twentieth century, space was conceived differently, and both traversed and looked out on from newer technological perspectives, which, at least for a time, consigned the railway and the cinema to narratives of the past.

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Notes Introduction 1 . The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, UK, 1948). 2. Wolfgang Schivelbusch stakes out how the railway ‘annihilated’ space and time in the nineteenth century. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (London and Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977). 3. See for example, Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (London:  Harvard University Press, 2002)  on the United States, and Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces:  Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (London:  University of California Press, 2001)  on Germany. 4. For example, Lynne Kirby describes the train as ‘an apt metaphor’ for moving images in her work on cinematic representations of railroads in silent films. See Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), 2.  Vanessa Toulmin’s history of travelling Bioscopes refers to a physical connection between the technologies, as early film distributors relied on the rail network to transport their shows. See Vanessa Toulmin, “Telling the Tale: The Story of the Fairground Bioscope Shows and the Showmen Who Operated Them,” Film History 6, no. 2 (1994): 219–​237. 5. The technologies are associated through aesthetics, with the cinema’s ‘tracking’ shot created by rigging a camera to a locomotive (see Kirby, Parallel Tracks, 2). Similarities also are evident between the window and the screen. See Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey; also Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (London: Verso, 2002). For further information on the travelogue genre and Hale’s Tours (an early twentieth century cinema auditorium designed to replicate a train carriage) see Charles Musser, “The Travel Genre in 1903–​1904: Moving Towards Fictional Narrative” in Early Cinema:  Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Charles Musser (London:  BFI, 1990), 123–​132. 6. In using the term ‘media’ to encompass trains as well as film, I draw on Frederic Jameson’s assertion that ‘ “media” traditionally includes and encompasses

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Notes to Pages 4–8 transportation as well.’ See Frederic Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (London: BFI Publishing, 1992), 13. 7. For rail figures, see BBC News, “Rail Travel at Highest Peacetime Level Since 1928,” January 31, 2011, http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​12320817 (accessed October 13, 2013). For cinema statistics, see Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace:  Cinema and Society in Britain 1930–​1939 (London and New York: Routledge, 1984), 11. 8. The population in 1928 was 45,580,000, and was 48,220,000 in 1940. Both Jan Lahmeyer, “United Kingdom:  Historical Demographical Data of the Whole Country,” http://​www.populstat.info/​Europe/​unkingdc.htm (accessed October 13, 2013). The number of journeys or cinema tickets is rounded to the nearest whole number. The figures may be higher than I have calculated here, because population figures include Northern Ireland. However, it is difficult to ascertain whether peak rail and cinema traffic applied only to England, Scotland and Wales. 9. For example, Bernhard Rieger and Martin Daunton use modernity to refer to temporal and spatial transformations between 1870 and 1930. See Bernhard Rieger and Martin Daunton, “Introduction” in Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late Victorian Era to World War II, eds. Martin Daunton and Bernhard Reiger (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 1. Richard Dennis, meanwhile, cites the period between 1840–​1930, although this ‘was not an unchanging slab of modernity’ and the start and end dates ‘are not cast in stone.’ See Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–​1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 26. 10. Rieger and Daunton, Meanings of Modernity, 1–​2. 11. Ibid., 5–​6. 12. Kirby, Parallel Tracks. 13. Ibid., 11. 14. Ibid., 190. 15. Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IA: Indiana University Press, 2004), 14. 16. Ibid. 17. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 23. 18. Ibid., 136. 19. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–​ 1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 9. 20. Ibid., 125. 21. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York, NY: W W Norton, 1994), 324. 22. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 164.

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Notes to Pages 8–11 23. Ibid., 33. 24. John M MacKenzie, “Empires of Travel:  British Guide Books and Cultural Imperialism in the 19th and 20th Centuries” in Histories of Tourism: Representation, Identity, Conflict, ed. John K Walton (Clevedon, Canada: Channel View Publications, 2005), 27. 25. Jill Steward, “ ‘How and Where to Go’: The Role of Travel Journalism in Britain and the Evolution of Foreign Tourism, 1840–​1914” in Histories of Tourism, ed. Walton, 52. 26. Lee Grieveson, “Introduction,” in Film and the End of Empire, eds. Lee Grieveson and Colin McCabe (London: British Film Institute, 2011), 2. 27. For example, women won the right to be considered ‘persons’ under British law in 1909. See the Manchester Guardian, “Women and the Vote,” March 18, 1909, p.9. Education Reform Acts in 1918 and 1944 expanded services to include more pupils. The British Broadcasting Corporation was established in 1927 to transmit politically unbiased programmes to the nation via mass media (the BBC was established in 1922 but it was not until 1927 that the corporation was formally recognised as a national, independent broadcaster by Royal Charter). And the implementation of the Beveridge Report in 1948 redefined Britain as a welfare state in which citizens’ fundamental needs were met by redistributing taxation. See Margaret Jones and Rodney Lowe, Beveridge to Blair: The First Fifty Years of the Welfare State, 1948–​98 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). 28. David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2010), 40–​42. 29. Bruno contends that ‘[i]‌n a movie theatre, as in a train, one […] travels in time and space, viewing panoramically from a still-​sitting position through a framed image in motion’. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, 156. 30. See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, MI:  Black and Red, 1967) on spectacle; Ward, Weimar Surfaces, on surface culture; and Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman on spectacularisation. 31. Ward, Weimar Surfaces, 1. 32. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle; Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947; repr., London: Verso, 1997), 120–​167. 33. Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry (1963; repr., London:  Routledge, 2001), 98. 34. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 33. 35. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1984). 36. Trade unions, which promoted inclusivity based on the commoditisation of labour, grew in size, number and power prior to the First World War. Co-​ operatives were also popularised, reinforcing the connections between

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Notes to Pages 11–16 inclusiveness and trade. See Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (London: Penguin Books, 1968), 136–​138. 37. David Marquand, Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2008), 9. 38. The Ghost Train (Walter Forde, UK, 1941). 39. For more on class and the railway, see Christian Wolmar, Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain (London:  Atlantic Books, 2007), 131, and Ian Carter, Railways and Culture in Britain:  The Epitome of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 10. 40. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–​1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 13. 41. Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight:  Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-​Victorian London (London:  Virago Press, 1992); Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Makings of London’s West End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 42. Jane Rendell, “Gender, Space” in Gender, Space, Architecture:  An Interdisciplinary Introduction, eds. Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner and Iain Borden (London: Routledge, 2000), 103. 43. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, no.25/​26 (1990): 62. 44. Jeff Weintraub, “The Theory and Politics of the Public/​Private Distinction,” in Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy, eds. Jeff Weintraub and Krishnan Kumar (Chicago, IL:  Chicago University Press, 1997), 22. 45. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL:  University of Chiago Press, 1958); Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London: Penguin, 1976). 46. Penny Sparke, The Modern Interior (London: Reaktion, 2008), 59. 47. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 7. 48. Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity:  Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 5. 49. Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 7. 50. Sparke, The Modern Interior, 10. 51. Arendt, The Human Condition. 52. W K L Dickson and Antonia Dickson, History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope and Kinetophone (London: Albert Bunn, 1895), 12. 53. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey; Kern, The Culture of Time and Space; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:  Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 54. The Flying Scotsman (Castleton Knight, UK, 1929).

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Notes to Pages 16–21 55. Railway Gazette, “Films on an Express Train,” March 14, 1924, p.380. 56. Flying Scotsman to Beat Timetable (British Movietone, UK, 1932); First Streamlined Diesel Train (British Movietone, UK, 1932). 57. A Kiss in the Tunnel (George Albert Smith, UK, 1899); The Wrecker (Géza von Bolváry, UK, 1928); The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchock, UK, 1938). 58. I use a broad definition of ‘culture’ that encompasses the minutiae of everyday life as well as the political, ideological, creative and economic factors that coalesce to shape how people interact with the world. Thus the term applies both to material production and a signifying system  –​see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976), 91. 59. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion. 60. Ibid., 15. 61. Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 62. Star, “Our London Letter,” March 19, 1896, p.2. ‘Cook’s ticket’ refers to travel agency Thomas Cook. 63. O Winter, “The Cinematograph,” The New Review, May 1896, p.507. 64. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006), 19. 65. Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time. 66. Ibid., 223. 67. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–​22. 68. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-​ Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986). 69. Night Mail (Henry Watt and Basil Wright, UK, 1936). 70. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. 71. Ibid., 92–​98. 72. Ibid., 98. 73. Ibid., 92. 74. Carolyn Steedman, Dust:  The Archive and Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 76. 75. Janet Thumim, “The Female Audience: Mobile Women and Married Ladies” in Nationalising Femininity:  Culture, Sexuality and British Cinema in the Second World War, eds. Christine Gledhill and Gillian Swanson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 238. 76. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 1981), 34–​35. 77. Ibid., 11. 78. Philip Rosen, Change Mummified:  Cinema, Historicity, Theory (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 239.

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Notes to Pages 21–29 79. Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 11. 80. Ibid., 12. 81. When the Devil Drives (Charles Urban, UK, 1907). 82. Behind the Lines with Our French Ally (Pathé Frères, UK, 1917); The Care of Our Wounded (Gaumont Pathé, UK, 1918); The Wonderful Organisation of the RAMC (British Topical Committee for War Films, UK, 1916). 83. The Wrecker (Géza von Bolváry, UK, 1929); Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock, UK, 1936). 84. Alice in Wonderland (Norman Z McLeod, USA, 1933). 85. New Berth for Bananas (British Pathé, UK, 1938) and Their Majesties Tour in Lanarkshire (British Pathé, UK, 1938).

Chapter One: Ghost Stories, Phantom Rides and Class at the Cinematograph Show 1. Ian Christie, The Last Machine:  Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World (London: BFI, 1994), 15. 2. Stephen Bottomore, “The Panicking Audience?: Early Cinema and the ‘Train Effect’,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19, no.2 (1999): 200–​ 201; Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous Spectator” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: British Film Institute, 1990) 114–​133; Martin Loiperdinger, “Lumière’s Arrival of the Train, Cinema’s Founding Myth,” The Moving Image 4, no.1 (2004): 89–​113. 3. Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment,” 117. 4. Judith Mayne asserts that spectators imbue films with meaning in part based on their creation of, and ability to read, intertextual references. See Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993), 64. 5. The Lumières show, usually cited as the first exhibition of moving pictures in Britain, occurred in February 1896. See Sheffield Daily Telegraph, “Living Photographs,” February 20, 1896, p.4. Lowe and Manvell record Paul’s first demonstration taking place in March 1896. See Rachel Lowe and Roger Manvell, The History of British Film, 1896–​1906 (London: George Allen and Unwell, 1948), 23. 6. L’Arrivée d’un Train à la Ciotat (Lumières, France, 1895); Royal Train (R W Paul, UK, 1896); Railway Ride Over the Tay Bridge (Peter Feathers, UK, 1897). 7. Bottomore, “The Panicking Audience?” 8. Ibid., 197–​198.

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Notes to Pages 29–32 9. Vanessa Toulmin, Electric Edwardians: The Story of the Mitchell and Kenyon Collection (London:  BFI Publishing, 2006); Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (London: Duke University Press, 2011). 10. For example, writers denigrated rural living and countryside inhabitants in Express and Advertiser, “A King in a Squabble,” January 19, 1895, p.3 and Yorkshire Herald, “The Great Northern Road,” April 24, 1895, p.4. 11. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey:  The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkley, CA:  University of California Press, 1977); Deirdre Boden and Roger Friedland, NowHere: Space, Time and Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 9. 12. David Harvey, Spaces of Capital:  Toward a Critical Geography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 373. 13. Mary Louisa Molesworth, “The Story of the Rippling Train” in The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, eds. Michael Cox and R A Gilbert (first published 1887; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 319. 14. Srdjan Smajic, Ghost-​Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists:  Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2010). 15. Charles Dickens, Complete Ghost Stories (1843; repr., London:  Wordsworth Classics, 2009), 56–​121; South Wales Echo, “Clarence Theatre, Pontypridd,” February 8, 1897, p.2. 16. Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings:  Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny, and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 2–​6. 17. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 10. 18. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–​ 1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 7. 19. Hilary Grimes, The Late Victorian Gothic:  Mental Science, the Uncanny, and Scenes of Writing (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 29. 20. For examples of ‘to let’ advertisements see Manchester Guardian, “Classifieds,” January 5, 1895, p.2 (see also Manchester Guardian, “Classifieds,” January 10, 1895, p.2 for further examples). For further information on interior design, see Penny Sparke, The Modern Interior (London: Reaktion, 2008), 37. 21. Pall Mall Gazette, “The Value of the New Photography,” February 14, 1896, p.8. 22. Pall Mall Gazette “Photographs of the Invisible!” February 18, 1896, p.3. 23. Smajic, Ghost-​Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists, 7. 24. Deborah Phillips, Fairground Attractions: A Genealogy of the Pleasure Ground (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 18. 25. Smajic, Ghost-​Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists, 3. 26. C J Cutliffe Hyne, “A Ghost Hunt,” Cambridge Independent Press, July 15, 1904, p.3.

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Notes to Pages 32–39 27. Jerome K Jerome, “The Mad Scientist” in The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, 383. 28. Smajic, Ghost-​Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists, 18. 29. Jerome, “The Mad Scientist,” 383. 30. Mrs Molesworth, “At the Dip of the Road,” Lloyds Weekly Newspaper, January 27, 1895, p.8. 31. Nottinghamshire Guardian, “The Fly,” September 14, 1895, p.6. 32. Fergus Hume, “The Red Star,” Lichfield Mercury, December 25, 1896, p.7. 33. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” in The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 14, Art and Literature (1919; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 341. 34. Julian Wolfreys proposes that the gothic was terrifying because it infiltrated familiar and domestic spaces. See Victorian Hauntings, 14. 35. Manchester Guardian, “In the Dore and Padley Tunnel,” December 26, 1891, p.6. 36. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 23. 37. Charles Dickens, “The Signalman” in Complete Ghost Stories, Charles Dickens (1866; repr., London: Wordsworth, 2009), 261. 38. Ibid. 39. Portsmouth Evening News, “Despoiled,” September 20, 1895, p.2. 40. Peterhead Sentinel and General Advertiser for Buchan District, “A New History of Buchan,” February 1, 1898, p.3. 41. Worcestershire Chronicle, “Notes by Observer,” June 30, 1900, p.4. 42. John Henry Pepper, The True History of Pepper’s Ghost (1890; repr., London: The Projection Box, 1996), ii. 43. Ibid., 22–​23. 44. Sheffield Daily Telegraph, “The Brightside Ghost Scare,” January 21, 1896, p.8. 45. Yorkshire Evening Post, “Another Haunted Village,” February 1, 1895, p.3. 46. Hampshire Advertiser, untitled, October 20, 1900, p.7. 47. Carlisle Patriot, “Mr Allison, MP, at Drumburgh,” February 1, 1895, p.7. 48. Yorkshire Herald, “The Great Northern Road,” April 24, 1895, p.4. 49. Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 125. 50. Worcestershire Chronicle, “Tangled Threads,” February 2, 1895, p.6. 51. Yorkshire Evening Post, “Another Haunted Village.” 52. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 50. 53. F A Mackenzie, “The Triumph of the Cinematograph,” Daily Mail, January 5, 1909, p.4. 54. Ibid. 55. Thomas Frost, The Old Showmen and the London Fairs (London:  Tinsley Brothers, 1875), 312–​313.

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Notes to Pages 39–45 56. South Wales Daily News, “Swansea,” December 7, 1896, p.6; Jersey Weekly Press and Independent, “David Devant’s Animated Photos,” June 18, 1898, p.3. 57. Jon Burrows, Marketing Modernity: Victorian Popular Shows and Early Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009), 179. 58. Andrew Shail, “Reading the Cinematograph: Short Fiction and the Intermedial Spaces of Early Cinema,” Early Popular Visual Culture 8, no.1 (2010): 50. 59. Lichfield Mercury, “The Cinematograph  –​An Interesting Development of Photography,” April 10, 1896, p.3. 60. The Chronophone was a brand of film show that synchronised recorded sound on wax cylinders with moving images. 61. World’s Fair, “The High Priests of the Chronophone,” April 20, 1907, p.5. 62. London Daily News, untitled, March 16, 1896, p.5. 63. St James’s Gazette, “Photographic Impressions,” April 20, 1904, p.17. 64. Star, “Our London Letter”, March 19, 1896, p.2. 65. Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, “Dramatic Gossip,’ January 11, 1902, p.6. 66. Era, “The Showman World,” June 23, 1906, p.23. 67. Lowe and Manvell, The History of British Film, 23. 68. London Daily News, untitled, March 16, 1896, p.5. 69. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay:  A  Psychological Study (New  York and London: D Appleton and Co., 1916), 14. 70. Lichfield Mercury, “The Cinematograph  –​An Interesting Development of Photography,” April 10, 1896, p.3. 71. Ibid. 72. Edinburgh Evening News, “The Empire Palace Theatre,” June 2, 1896, p.2. 73. O Winter, “The Cinematograph,” The New Review, May 1896, pp.507–​513. 74. The Countryman and the Cinematograph (R W Paul, UK, 1901). There was ‘a wider trend for films that undermined countryside rubes’, which included My First Visit to a Motion Picture Show (Kineto, USA, 1910) and Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (Edison, USA, 1902). See Bottomore, “The Panicking Audience?” 178. 75. Dundee Evening Telegraph, “The Palace Theatre,” December 13, 1910, p.4. 76. Winter, “The Cinematograph.” 77. Bottomore, “The Panicking Audience?” 200–​201. 78. Ibid., 201. 79. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 136. 80. Molesworth, “At the Dip of the Road.” 81. A Railway Collision (R W Paul, UK, 1898). 82. Dickens, “The Signalman,” 264. 83. Ibid., 260.

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Notes to Pages 46–53 84. Pall Mall Gazette, “Li Hung Chang in Paris,” July 21, 1896, p.7. 85. Edward Said describes Orientalism as ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.’ Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1977), 3. 86. Punch, “At the Palace,” August 6, 1898, p.57. 87. Ibid. 88. G E Farrow, The Cinematograph Train (London: R Brimley Johnson, 1904), 4. 89. Ibid., 5. 90. Shail, “Reading the Cinematograph,” 57. 91. Charles Musser, “The Travel Genre in 1903–​1904: Moving Towards Fictional Narrative” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, eds. Charles Musser and Adam Barker (London: BFI, 1990), 128. 92. South Wales Echo, “The Empire, Swansea,” March 15, 1898, p.2. 93. Grantham Journal, “District Intelligence,” November 10, 1898, p.3. 94. Jersey Weekly Press and Independent, “David Devant’s Animated Photos,” June 18, 1898, p.3 95. Ibid. 96. Molesworth, “The Story of the Rippling Train,” 323. 97. Hampshire Advertiser, “Supposed Haunted House at Southampton,” July 21, 1897, p.4. 98. E Nesbit, “In Hammering Wood,” Illustrated London News, October 30, 1897, p.603–​605. 99. Railway Ride Over the Tay Bridge (Robert Pennycook, UK, 1897); View from an Engine Front –​Barnstaple (George Hepworth, UK, 1898); Phantom Ride on the Furness Railway (UK, 1900). 100. Dundee Courier, “Feathers’ Animated Panorama,” September 24, 1901, p.4. 101. A Trip on the Metropolitan Railway (UK, 1910). 102. Train Entering and Exiting a Tunnel (Cecil Hepworth, UK, 1899); The Arlberg Railway (UK, 1906). 103. Wexford Railway Station (Mitchell and Kenyon, UK, 1902). Foucault describes heterotopias as existing outside ordinary cultural spaces while remaining connected ‘to all the other emplacements of the city or the society’. He cites the railway as an example. See Michel Foucault, “Other Spaces” in Aesthetics: Essential Works of Michgeorge el Foucault 1954–​1984 Volume 2, ed. James D Faubion (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 180. 104. Conwy Castle –​Panoramic View of Conwy on the L.&N.W. Railway (British Mutoscope and Biograph, 1898). 105. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 31. 106. Punch, “At the Palace,” August 6, 1898, p.57. 107. Stage, “London Variety Stage,” May 5, 1898, p.17.

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Notes to Pages 54–59 108. When the Devil Drives (Charles Urban, UK, 1907). 109. Stage, “Cinematograph Notes,” October 17, 1907, p.10. 110. Vanessa Toulmin, Randall William, King of the Showmen:  From the Ghost Show to Bioscope (London:  The Projection Box, 1998); Vanessa Toulmin, “Telling the Tale:  The Story of the Fairground Bioscope Shows and the Showmen Who Operated Them,” Film History 6, no. 2 (1994): 219–​237. 111. Diss Express, “Debate on Country and Town Life,” April 3, 1903, p.5. 112. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey; Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 34. 113. World’s Fair, “The Home Secretary on Iterant Shows,” November 21, 1908, p.7. 114. Era, “Hobby Horses and Swings at the Fairs,” May 16, 1908, p.26. 115. World’s Fair, “Aberdare,” April 28, 1906, p.1. 116. World’s Fair, “Syko, the Clairvoyant,” August 25, 1906, p.1. 117. Phantom Ride on the Furness Railway (UK, 1900). 118. Devil’s Dyke Fun Fair (James Williamson, UK, 1896, SASE); A Switchback Railway (R W Paul, UK, 1898); Les Montagnes Russes, Blackpool’s Latest Attraction (UK, 1902). 119. Manchester Guardian, “May-​Day Festivities,” May 2, 1890, p.5. 120. Manchester Guardian, “Military Exhibition at Earl’s Court,” May 6, 1901, p.10. 121. World’s Fair, “Tunnel Railway,” July 28, 1906, p.4; Phillips, Fairground Attractions, 22. 122. Josephine Kane, The Architecture of Pleasure:  British Amusement Parks 1900–​1939 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 4. 123. Mervyn Heard, “Introduction” in The True History of Pepper’s Ghost, John Henry Pepper, iv. 124. Hull Daily Mail, “Grimsby Mail,” May 14, 1896, p.2; Era, untitled, May 16, 1896, p.20; Era, untitled, May 23, 1896, p.19; Era, untitled, May 30, 1896, p.18. 125. Jon Burrows, “Penny Pleasures II:  Indecency, Anarchy and Junk Films in London’s ‘Nickelodeons,’ 1906–​1914,” Film History 16, no. 2, (2004): 173. 126. Toulmin, “Telling the Tale,” 219. 127. Whitsuntide Fair at Preston (Mitchell and Kenyon, UK, 1906). 128. Manchester Guardian, “The World’s Phonograph Company, Amsterdam,” June 23, 1896, 1. 129. James MacKenzie, Strange Truth: The Autobiography of a Circus, Showman, Stage & Exhibition Man vol. 1 (Brunel University), 246. 130. Ann Featherstone (ed.), The Journals of Sydney Race 1892–​1900: A Provincial View of Popular Entertainment (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 2007), 85–​86. 131. Daily Mail, “Showmen’s Meeting,” January 27, 1898, p.3. 132. Lowe and Manvell, The History of British Film, 38. 133. World’s Fair, “Chronophone,” March 30, 1906, p.8.

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Notes to Pages 59–66 134. Toulmin, Electric Edwardians, 8 and 66. 135. “Happy Saturday Evenings,” Poster for Derby Temperance Hall, April 8, 1899, Fred Holmes Collection, National Fairground Archive. 136. A letter writer describes seeing a film called The Train Wreckers at a fair in Wrexham. See Manchester Guardian, “Pernicious Shows,” April 19, 1906 p.4. 137. World’s Fair, “Round the Picture Shows,” October 31, 1908, p.10. 138. Toulmin, Electric Edwardians, 8. 139. Employees Leaving Furness Railway Works, Barrow (UK, 1901), and Employees Leaving North Eastern Engine Works, Gateshead (Mitchell and Kenyon, UK, 1901). 140. Grantham Journal, “Grantham Industrial and Fine Art Exhibition,” January 2, 1897, p.4. 141. World’s Fair, “The World’s Fairograph,” October 5, 1907, p.9. 142. World’s Fair, “London to Have its Blackpool,” May 14, 1907, p.4. 143. Letter to Fred Holmes from Jasper Redfern, May 1, 1903, Fred Holmes Collection, National Fairground Archive. 144. Letter to Fred Holmes from Jasper Redfern, May 10, 1901, Fred Holmes Collection, National Fairground Archive. 145. Toulmin, Randall Williams, 1 and 16. 146. World’s Fair, “Plain Talks With Travellers,” July 14, 1906, p.1. 147. World’s Fair, “Destructive Fire on the Railway,” July 28, 1906, p.4; World’s Fair, “Showman’s Goods by Rail,” March 30, 1907, p.4. 148. World’s Fair, “Wanted to Buy,” November 5, 1904, p.1. 149. Toulmin, Electric Edwardians, 13. 150. Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 23. 151. Featherstone, The Journals of Sydney Race, 78–​79. 152. Unknown, “Animated Pictures at the Public Hall,” c1902, Fred Holmes Collection, National Fairground Archive. 153. Hull Daily Mail, untitled, April 13, 1908, p.1. 154. Manchester Guardian, “An Actor-​Manager’s Lament,” September 4, 1906, p.12. 155. World’s Fair, “The Illusion of Life and the Disappointed Creditor,” November 9, 1907, p.1. 156. Landing at Low Tide (Birt Acres, UK, c1896). 157. Annabelle Butterfly Dance (Edison, USA, 1894); Boxing Kangaroo (R W Paul and Birt Acres, UK, 1895); New Bar Room (Edison, USA, 1895). 158. Hull Roster, Palace Theatre Hull advertisement, August 16, 1902, p.1, Fred Holmes Collection, National Fairground Archive. 159. Toulmin, Randall Williams, 38. 160. World’s Fair, “Glasgow Fair,” July 31, 1906, p.1. 161. Lowe and Manvell, The History of British Film, 37.

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Notes to Pages 66–71 162. F A Mackenzie, “The Triumph of the Cinematograph,” Daily Mail, January 5, 1909, p.4. 163. Brad Beaven, Leisure, Citizenship and Working-​ Class  Men, 1850–​ 1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 17.

Chapter Two: Ambulance Trains and Domestic Conflict in the First World War 1. The Care of Our Wounded (Gaumont Pathé, UK, 1916–​1918). 2. Emily Jean Hardstone, While the World Sleeps, 1917, Imperial War Museum. 3. The Friends Ambulance Unit was a Quaker organisation set up in 1914 to support the British Expeditionary Force on the continent. The FAU provided religious conscientious objectors with the opportunity to contribute to the war effort while ensuring the preservation of life. Many FAU members served on the ambulance trains, in particular Nos. 16 and 17. The organisation’s manifesto and early success were recorded in Geoffrey Winthrop Young, A Story of the Work of the Friends’ Ambulance Unit October 1914 –​February 1915. 4. In a previously published article-​length version of this chapter, I cited nine extant films. These were: The Wonderful Organisation of the RAMC (British Topical Committee for War Films, UK, 1916); Behind the Lines with Our French Ally (Pathé Frères, UK, 1917); The Military Power of France (Gaumont Pathé, UK, 1917); New Zealand Ambulance (New Zealand, c.1917); Latest US Ambulance Train (Gaumont Pathé, UK, 1917); The Care of Our Wounded (Gaumont Pathé, UK, 1918); Red Cross Ambulance Train Used by Germans for Ammunition (UK, 1918); and Hospital Offered by the Americans in France (Gaumont Pathé, France, 1920). See Rebecca Harrison, ‘Writing History on the Page and Screen: Mediating Conflict through Britain’s First World War Ambulance Trains,’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 35, no. 4 (2015): 559–​578. However, thanks to the Imperial War Museum’s digitisation programme, I  have since located three more ambulance train films. These are:  Berlin News Service Reports (Germany, 1915); America’s Answer to the Hun (US Signal Corps, UK, 1918); and The World’s Greatest Story (New Era Film, UK, 1919). 5. Under the Red Cross (UK, 1914); John and the Ambulance (UK, 1914); Roses of Life (Gaumont Pathé, UK, 1915); Red Cross Pluck (Ethyle Batley, UK, 1915). To my knowledge, none of these fiction films survive in any British archive today, so they are unavailable for viewing. 6. For example, Railway Gazette, “The London and South-​Western Ambulance Train,” August 29, 1914, pp.336–​338 and Railway Gazette, “Life and Work on an Ambulance Train,” February 2, 1918, pp.131–​132.

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Notes to Pages 71–72 7. Although the military and the Red Cross maintained their own hierarchies, progression was not necessarily determined by birth right but by skill. 8. Philip M Taylor, British Democracy in the Twentieth Century:  Selling Propaganda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 2–​3. 9. This more than doubled the percentage of voters from twenty-​eight to seventy-​ eight. See David Marquand, Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2008), 19. 10. Benedict Anderson argues that the nation ‘is an imagined political community –​and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’, which became ‘the legitimate international norm’ for conceiving of identity after the First World War. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 6 and 131. 11. Christopher Lawrence describes how the medical profession in Britain had reached consensus about germ theory (which proposed that bacteria caused certain diseases) by the 1890s. See Christopher Lawrence, Medicine and the Making of Modern Britain, 1700–​1920 (London: Routledge, 1994), 1969. 12. Virginia Berridge, “Health and Medicine’ in The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–​1950 Volume 3:  Social Agencies and Institutions, ed. F M L Thompson (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1990), 208. 13. Richard Dyer, White:  Essays on Race and Culture (London:  Routledge, 1997), 76. 14. Dyer also asserts that ‘[w]‌hiteness has been enormously, often terrifyingly effective in unifying coalitions of disparate groups of people’. Indeed, he contends that whiteness has been more successful than class ‘in uniting people across national cultural differences and against their best interests.’ Ibid., 19. 15. For example in Anonymous, Letters from No. 26 Ambulance Train, December 1918–​1919; Leonard Wiseman Horner, Private Papers of L W Horner, 1915–​ 1918; and Margaret Allan Brander, Private Papers of Miss M A Brander, Volume 1, 1914–​1915, all Imperial War Museum. 16. Jeffrey S Reznick proposes that ordinary hospital sites were represented by British media as ‘models of efficiency, economy and comfort’ to divert attention from ‘the horrors of wartime life.’ See Jeffrey S Reznick, Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 43. 17. Caregiving trains were also common in Britain, although these were more typically of the naval variety. To my knowledge, there are no extant films featuring these vehicles. Naval ambulance trains had removable cots that accompanied the wounded throughout their time on the train or hospital ship. The army equivalents had fixed cots that men were loaded to and from by stretchers. Naval ambulance trains in Britain ran between the five principal

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Notes to Pages 72–75 ports at Edinburgh, Hull, Plymouth, Portsmouth and Chatham. By the time the wounded reached these ambulance services, they were far removed from the deprivations of the battlefield. See Edwin A  Pratt, British Railways and the Great War Vol. II:  Organisation, Efforts, Difficulties and Achievements (London: Selwyn and Blount Ltd, 1921). 18. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey:  The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), 10. 19. John Westwood, Railways at War (London: Osprey, 1980), 129. 20. Surgeon-​ General Sir T Longmore, A Manual of Ambulance Transport (London: Harrison and Sons, 1893), 349. 21. Ibid., 29. 22. Ibid. 23. Including the 1861–​1865 American Civil War, 1870–​1871 Franco-​Prussian War, and the 1899–​1902 British-​South African (Boer) War. 24. John S Haller Jr, Battlefield Medicine:  A  History of the Military Ambulance through the Napoleonic Wars through World War 1 (Carbondale and Edwardville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), 63. 25. Ibid. 26. John F Plumridge, Hospital Ships and Ambulance Trains (London:  Seeley, Service and Co., 1975), 91. 27. “The Transport of Sick and Wounded by Rail,” British Medical Journal 2, no. 1959 (1898): 139. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. E N Bennett, With Methuen’s Column on an Ambulance Train (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co Ltd, 1900), 19. 32. Ibid. 33. Edwin A Pratt, British Railways and the Great War Vol. I: Organisation, Efforts, Difficulties and Achievements (London: Selwyn and Blount Ltd, 1921), 199. 34. Ibid. 35. Colonel G A  Moore, The Birth and Early Days of Our Ambulance Trains in France, August 1914 (London: John Bale, Sons and Danielsson Ltd, 1922), 4–​5. 36. Ibid. 37. Sir Theodore Fox, A Boy with the BEF: Recollections of 1918, 1919, Imperial War Museum, 15. 38. Moore, The Birth and Early Days of Our Ambulance Trains in France, 5. 39. “Ambulance Trains,” British Medical Journal 1, no. 3260 (1923): 1061. 40. Haller Jr, Battlefield Medicine, 181.

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Notes to Pages 75–78 41. Pratt, British Railways and the Great War Vol. II, 562. 42. Plumridge, Hospital Ships and Ambulance Trains, 115. 43. Ibid, 90. 44. Ibid. 45. Pratt, British Railways and the Great War Vol. I, 200. 46. Ibid. 47. For example, different companies were given press attention for making ambulance trains or contributing to the war effort with charitable donations. See Railway News, “Great Central Railway Ambulance or Hospital Trains for the British Army,” August 22, 1914, pp.320–​321; Railway News, “The London and South-​Western Ambulance Train,” August 29, 1914, pp.336–​338; and Railway News, “Ambulance Trains on the London and North-​Western Railway,” August 29, 1914, pp.338–​339. 48. Railway News, “The London and South-​Western Railway Ambulance Train,” August 29, 1914, p.338. 49. Railway News, “North-​ Eastern Railway Company’s Ambulance Train for France,” November 17, 1917, p.439. 50. Railway News, “Ambulance Trains on the London and North-​Western Railway,” August 29, 1914, p.338. 51. Plumridge, Hospital Ships and Ambulance Trains, 106. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. H Massac Buist, “Ambulance Work at the Front,” British Medical Journal 2, no. 2806 (1914): 642. 55. No. 26 Ambulance Train December 1918–​1919, 2. 56. Fox, A Boy with the BEF, 15. 57. Ibid. 58. E M McCarthy, The Work of the Nursing Sisters with British Ambulance Trains and Station Units in France in 1914, 1919, Imperial War Museum, 2. 59. Geoffrey Winthrop Young, A Story of the Work of the Friends’ Ambulance Unit: October 1914 –​February 1915, 1915, Imperial War Museum, 4. 60. Horner, August 5, 1915. 61. Berridge, “Health and Medicine,” 208. 62. Darcy Power, “The Medical Institutions of London,” British Medical Journal 2, no. 1803 (1898): 141–​146. 63. “General and Stationary Hospitals,” British Medical Journal 1, no.  2873 (1916): 141. 64. A Train Errant:  Being the Experiences of a Voluntary Unit in France, and an Anthology from their Magazine (Hertford: Simson and Co, Limited, 1919), 3. 65. Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 79–82 66. Ibid., 2. 67. Fox, A Boy with the BEF, 15. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Plumridge, Hospital Ships and Ambulance Trains, 89. 71. A Train Errant, 4. 72. Morgan, The Private Papers of Miss F Morgan 1916–​1918, June 3, 1916. 73. Ibid. 74. “The Way Home of the Wounded Man,” British Medical Journal 2, no. 2811 (1914): 851. 75. Royal Army Medical Corps, Guide to Hospital Spaces, c.1914–​1918. 76. Brander, The Private Papers of Miss M A Brander Volume 1, March 15, 1915. 77. The Care of Our Wounded (Gaumont Pathé, UK, 1918). 78. Lines of Communication (London: Wightman and Co., Ltd. 1919), 101. 79. Fox, A Boy with the BEF, 20. 80. Ibid. 81. Lines of Communication, 101. 82. Yvonne McEwen, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’: British and Irish Nurses in the Great War (Dunfermline: Cualann Press Limited, 2006), 61. 83. No. 26 Ambulance Train December 1918–​1919, 3. 84. Horner, The Private Papers of L W Horner, October 31, 1915. 85. Brander, The Private Papers of Miss M A Brander Volume 1, May 2, 1915. 86. Ibid. 87. Captain H C Meysey-​Thompson, The Private Papers of H C Meysey-​Thompson, 1917, 85–​86. 88. Fox, A Boy with the BEF, 17 and 22. 89. Ibid., 22. 90. Ibid., 24. 91. Horner, The Private Papers of L W Horner, December 20, 1915. 92. Young, A Story of the Work of the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, 4. 93. Fox, A Boy With the BEF, 23. 94. Pratt, British Railways and the Great War Vol II, 571. 95. Ibid. 96. Brander, The Private Papers of Miss M A Brander Volume 1, January 1, 1915. 97. Ibid., March 15, 1915. 98. Morgan, The Private Papers of Miss F Morgan 1916–​1918, July 1, 1916. 99. Ibid. 100. Ibid. 101. Friends’ Ambulance Unit, No. 16 Ambulance Train Logbook 1915–​1919, June 30 –​July 1, 1916, National Archives.

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Notes to Pages 82–86 102. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 10. 103. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1999), 124. 104. Ibid. 105. Illustrated London News, “Paris Garters,” “Aitchison & Co,” and “Smith and Sons Watches” advertisements, July 18, 1914, p.114. 106. Illustrated London News, “The Camera as War-​Correspondent:  Notes by Photography,” December 4, 1916, p.720. 107. Illustrated London News, “The Camera as Recorder: News by Photography,” March 4, 1916, p.297; The Illustrated London News, “The Camera in Three Continents: War News by Photography,” March 11, 1916, p.328. 108. Illustrated London News, “The First Photograph of a Diver at the Bottom of the Sea,” July 25, 1914, p.137. 109. Illustrated London News, “Science Jottings and Notes,” September 5, 1914, p.864. 110. Ibid. 111. Bioscope Supplement, “Kineto, Limited” advertisement, January 7, 1915, p.iv. 112. Ibid. 113. Bioscope, “Pathé Frères Cinema” advertisement, January 29, 1915, p.368. 114. Ibid. 115. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 130. 116. Bioscope, “Gaumont Company Limited” advertisement, February 25, 1915, p.704. 117. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 90. 118. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage Books, 1980), 57. 119. T S Eliot, “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock,” in Collected Poems 1909–​1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 3. 120. Cate Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 45. 121. Luke McKernan, “Propaganda, Patriotism and Profit:  Charles Urban and British Official War Films in America during the First World War,” Film History 14 (2002): 369. 122. Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning, 31. 123. Ibid. 124. Times, “Our Duty Towards the Cinema,” April 6, 1915, p.11. 125. Philip M Taylor, British Democracy in the Twentieth Century:  Selling Propaganda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 27. 126. Topical Films comprised: Barker Motion Photography; the British & Colonial Kinematograph Company; Éclair Film; Gaumont; Jury’s Imperial Pictures;

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Notes to Pages 86–91 Kineto; and Topical Film. See Bioscope, “Official Pictures of the British Army in France,” January 6, 1916, p.89. 127. Times, “Films of Our Army in France,” December 20, 1915, p.6. 128. Manchester Guardian, “British Army War Films,” January 13, 1916, p.8. 129. Daily Express, “Official War Films,” January 18, 1916, p.2. 130. Henry Newbolt, “The War Films,” Times, October 14, 1916, p.7. 131. Bioscope, “Civilians, Fall In!” May 24, 1917, pp.717–​719. 132. For example in The Wonderful Organisation of the RAMC (British Topical Committee for War Films, UK, 1916), The Care of Our Wounded (Gaumont Pathé, UK, 1918)  and Topical Budget  –​ Ambulance for Horses (War Office, UK, 1917). 133. British Army in France (Gaumont Pathé, UK, 1916). 134. Bioscope, “British Army in France,” and “The Devil’s Bondman,” January 13, 1916. 135. Times, “Front Line Films,” August 9, 1916, p.3. 136. Bioscope, “Official Pictures of the British Army in France,” January 6, 1916, p.89. 137. Bioscope, “The Official War Films,” February 6, 1916, p.503. 138. Times, “Films of Our Army in France,” p.6. 139. Brander, The Private Papers of Miss M A Brander, January 19, 1915. 140. Illustrated London News, “A Hospital Ceiling as a Screen for Moving Pictures: A Cinema for Bedridden Wounded Soldiers at a Base in France,” August 10, 1918, p.1. 141. Bioscope, “A Cinema Theatre at the Front,” February 4, 1915, p.457. 142. Ibid. 143. The Result of Cinema Day (UK, 1916). 144. Ibid. 145. Mrs John Bull Prepared (UK, 1918). 146. Taylor, British Democracy in the Twentieth Century, 3. 147. Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning, 30. 148. Taylor, British Democracy in the Twentieth Century, 6. 149. Times, “Films of Our Army in France,” p.6. 150. Illustrated London News, “ ‘An Epic of Self-​Sacrifice and Gallantry’:  British War Films,” August 26, 1916, pp.240–​241. 151. Another example of the link between cinemagoing and charity was the nationally recognised Cinema Day, which was held annually on November 9 to raise funds from admissions to pay for motor ambulances. See Bioscope, “The Ambulance Fund,” January 6, p.4. 152. “The Red Cross Film,” The Manchester Guardian, February 3, 1918, p.5. 153. Horner, The Private Papers of L W Horner, March 20, 1916.

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Notes to Pages 93–101 154. Michael Hammond argues that in First World War films ‘[t]‌here was a tension between the attraction of real action footage and the educative properties of experiencing first-​hand what the boys at the front were going through.’ Michael Hammond, The Big Picture Show: British Cinema Culture in the Great War, 1914–​1918 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press), 101. 155. Pathé Old Negative Collection 15 (British Pathé, UK, 1915). 156. RAMC Medical Officer, quoted in McEwen, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,’ 62. 157. Lines of Communication, 47. 158. Ibid. 159. Young, A Story of the Work of the Friends’ Ambulance Unit. 160. Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing:  What it is, and What it is Not (New York: D Appleton and Company, 1860). 161. Brander, The Private Papers of M A Brander Vol. 1, August 17, 1915. 162. From Trinidad to Serve the Empire (Topical Budget, UK, 1916); With Indian Troops at the Front Part One (War Office, UK, 1916). 163. Our Empire’s Fight for Freedom Part Two (UK, 1918). 164. Hammond suggests that for audiences on the home front, slow pans and medium close-​ups of British troops ‘provide[d]‌the chance of finding the face of someone they knew.’ See Hammond, The Big Picture Show, 115. 165. Brander, The Private Papers of Miss M A Brander, May 2, 1915. 166. Ibid. 167. Lines of Communication (London: Wightman and Co., Ltd. 1919), 9. 168. A Train Errant, 5. 169. Ibid., 6. 170. Morgan, The Private Papers of Miss F Morgan, May 26, 1916. 171. Ibid., May 29, 1916. 172. Ibid., May 25, 1916. 173. Horner, The Private Papers of L W Horner, September 26, 1917. 174. Ibid. 175. Fox, A Boy With The BEF, 26. 176. Ibid., 25. 177. A Train Errant, 4. 178. Railway News, “Princess Christian Hospital Train,” April 17, 1915, p.628. 179. Railway News, “Midland Railway Ambulance Train for Service with the American Expeditionary Forces,” January 5, 1918, p.7. 180. Railway News, “The Canadian Northern Railway and the War,” May 15, 1915 p.784. 181. Illustrated London News, “Benger’s Food,” July 13, 1918, p.51. 182. A Train Errant, 2. 183. Ibid., 4.

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Notes to Pages 102–111 184. Christine Gledhill, Reframing British Cinema 1918–​1928: Between Restraint and Passion (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 2. 185. Horner, The Private Papers of L W Horner, December 12, 1915. 186. In her work on nurses on the Western Front, McEwan highlights a case whereby a staff nurse died of shell shock on active service. McEwan, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,’ 99. 187. Carolyn Steedman argues that unlike books, films and other published materials, the personal testimonies we discover in archives have ‘unintended reader[s]‌’. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 75. 188. Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 11. 189. Hardstone, While the World Sleeps, 4. 190. Lee Grieveson, “Introduction” in Film and the End of Empire, eds. Lee Grieveson and Colin McCabe (London: British Film Institute, 2011), 1. 191. Westwood, Railways at War, 153. 192. Ibid. 193. Railway News, “The Channel Tunnel:  A  Link Between East and West,” October 6, 1917, p.297. 194. Haller Jnr, Battlefield Medicine, 181.

Chapter Three: Train Crashes, Cinema Fires, and the Precarious Modern Woman 1. The Flying Scotsman (Castleton Knight, UK, 1929). 2. Pamela M Graves, Labour Women: Women in British Working-​Class Politics 1918–​1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 168. 3. Pat Thane “The Welfare State and Labour Market” in Work and Pay in Twentieth Century Britain, eds. Nicholas Crafts, Ian Gazeley and Andrew Newell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 181. 4. Krista Cowman and Louise A  Jackson, “Introduction:  Women’s Work” in Women and Work Culture:  Britain c.1850–​1950, eds. Krista Cowman and Louise A Jackson (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2005), 2. 5. This is a canon of surviving films that does not include those unavailable for viewing (even if the lost movies are known to represent women on the railways). This means that, while the chapter investigates the period between 1918 and 1939, the films I  use represent a shorter period between 1929 and 1946. The canon is:  The Wrecker (Géza von Bolváry, UK, 1929); The Flying Scotsman (Castleton Knight, UK, 1929); Number Seventeen (Alfred

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Notes to Pages 111–116 Hitchcock, UK, 1932); The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, UK, 1935); Seven Sinners (Albert de Courville, UK, 1936); Kate Plus Ten (Reginald Denham, UK, 1938); and The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, UK, 1938). 6. Shooting Stars (Anthony Asquith, UK, 1929); Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock, UK, 1936). 7. Amy Richter, Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad and Public Domesticity (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 60. 8. Shelley Stamp, Movie-​Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the 1910s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8. 9. Ibid. 10. Janet Thumim, “The Female Audience: Mobile Women and Married Ladies” in Nationalising Femininity:  Culture, Sexuality and British Cinema in the Second World War, eds. Christine Gledhill and Gillian Swanson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 238. 11. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–​1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987). 12. Ibid., 33. 13. Jane Rendell, “Gender, Space” in Gender, Space, Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, eds. Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner and Ian Borden (London: Routledge, 2000), 104. 14. Judy Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900–​50 (London: Macmillan, 1995), 8. 15. Miriam Glucksmann, Women Assemble: Women Workers and the New Industries in Interwar Britain (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1990), 206. 16. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–​18; John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London:  Penguin Books, 1972); Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight:  Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-​ Victorian London (London: Virago Press, 1992. 17. Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IA:  Indiana University Press, 2004), 27; Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces:  Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (London: University of California Press, 2001). 18. Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 7. 19. Woman’s Weekly, untitled, August 6, 1898, p.5 20. Daily Mail, “Mania for Travelling. Woman Who Almost Lives on the Railway,” September 17, 1903, p.3. 21. Ibid. 22. Kristina Huneault, Difficult Subjects:  Working Women and Visual Culture, Britain 1880–​1914 (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2002), 116. 23. Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 116–120 24. Manchester Guardian, “Women and the Vote,” March 18, 1909, p.4. 25. Better working conditions were achieved through the Shops Act 1909 and the Trade Boards Act 1911. Also in 1911, both unemployment and national insurance systems began. While these schemes provided men more security than women (due to certain exclusions relating to female employment), women had improved access to work and legal support. See Pat Thane, “The Welfare State and Labour Market,” Work and Pay in Twentieth Century Britain, 181–​183. 26. A Suffragette’s Dream (Pathé Frères, UK, 1909). 27. Era, “Film Gossip,” February 13, 1909, p.27. 28. For information on women’s work as wartime projectionists, see David R Williams, “Ladies of the Lamp: The Employment of Women in the British Film Trade During World War I,” Film History 9, no. 1 (1997): 116–​27. 29. Electric Railway and Tramway Journal, “Women as Conductors,” September 17, 1917, p.165. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Women Railway Workers (British Pathé, UK, c1914). 35. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928; repr., London: Penguin, 2000), 34. 36. The Midnight Mail (Cecil Hepworth, UK, 1915). 37. For example, Mr J W Shergold, a manager at the General Post Office (GPO), voiced a number of complaints about women workers to the War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry (1918) in order to justify dispensing with the female labourers’ services. War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry, Letter to Mr Murray (War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry) from J W Shergold (General Post Office), National Archives, December 12, 1918. 38. Times, “Advice to Educated Women,” December 10, 1918, p.11. 39. Times, “A Thorough Feminist,” December 5, 1918, p.12. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Cowman and Jackson, “Introduction,” Women and Work Culture, 2. 43. British Railways, Rates of Pay and Conditions of Service of Railway Staff, Draft Circular Letter to Controlled Railway Companies of Great Britain, National Archives, 1920. 44. Ibid. 45. British Railways, Minutes of Meeting Between the Minister of Transport, National Railwaymen’s Union, and Railway Clerks’ Association, National Archives, August 5, 1920.

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Notes to Pages 120–125 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. British Railways, Controlled Railway Companies, Summary of Classification of Women and Girl Clerks, Shewing Total Numbers and Percentages in Each Class, National Archives, October 21, 1920. 49. Caroline Merz, “The Tension of Genre:  Wendy Toye and Muriel Box” in Re-​Viewing British Cinema, 1900–​1992:  Essays and Interviews, ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon (New York, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), 122. 50. Ibid., 7. 51. Daily Mail, “Must it End with Marriage?” November 7, 1927, p.19. 52. H Reynard, “Give Your Daughters the Chances You Give Your Sons,” Times, November 8, 1927, p.18. 53. Manchester Guardian, “The Higher Education of Women,” July 13, 1922, p.14. 54. Manchester Guardian, “Women in Agriculture,” July 10, 1922, p.4. 55. Manchester Guardian, “Women in the News,” July 11, 1922, p.6. 56. A One Woman Job! (British Pathé, UK, 1928). 57. The Railway Queen (British Pathé, UK, 1929). 58. Bernhard Rieger argues that ‘accidents, often resulting in mutilation or death, dramatically demonstrated technologies’ perils and confirmed latent fears of new objects. Airship explosions, plane crashes and shipwrecks regularly featured in the main news pages as well as in cinema newsreels.’ See Bernhard Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany 1890–​ 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 83. 59. A Railway Collision (R W Paul, UK, 1898). 60. Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity, 83. 61. Ibid., 52. 62. Jill L Matus, “Trauma, Memory and the Railway Disaster:  The Dickensian Connection,” Victorian Studies 43, no. 3 (2001): 413. 63. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey:  The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkley, CA:  University of California Press, 1977), 136. 64. National Railway Museum, Railway Accidents, www.nrm.org.uk/​~/​media/​ files/​nrm/​pdf/​…/​resource-​pack-​accidents.pdf (accessed November 18, 2016). 65. Railways (Prevention of Accidents) Bill, National Archives, 1900. 66. Ibid. 67. Daily Telegraph, “Audible Railway Signals,” March 1, 1907, p.8. 68. Richard Gray, One Hundred Years of Cinema Architecture (London:  Lund Humphries Publishers, 1996), 22. 69. Times, “The Paris Disaster,” May 6, 1897, p.8; Lincolnshire Echo, “Hypnotised with Fear,” May 5, 1897, p.3.

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Notes to Pages 125–130 70. World’s Fair, “The Prevention of Fires at Cinematograph Shows,” December 19, 1908, p.5. 71. Statutory Rules and Orders, 1910, Cinematograph Act, 1909, National Archives, 1909, p.1. 72. Pall Mall Gazette, “The Grantham Railway Disaster: Board of Trade Report,” December 29, 1906, p.6. 73. Daily Mail, “Express Wreck,” June 22, 1912, p.5. 74. Daily Mirror, “Terrible Railway Smash in Wales,” October 4, 1904, p.3. 75. Daily Mirror, “First Photographs of the Fatal Railway Accident,” October 5, 1904, p1; Daily Mirror, “Pictures of the Wrecked Express Train,” October 6, 1904, p9. 76. Manchester Guardian, “Collision in Yorkshire,” March 4, 1909, p.7. 77. Pall Mall Gazette, “Blizzard Disaster,” December 29, 1906, p.7. 78. Railway Accident (British Pathé, UK, 1910); Goods Train Wreck Blocks Mainline (British Movietone, UK, 1934); and Disastrous Train Collision (British Movietone, UK, 1935). 79. Life of an American Fireman (Edwin S Porter and George S Fleming, USA, 1903). 80. Married Love (Alexander Butler, UK, 1923). 81. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion:  Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 44. 82. Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity, 53. 83. David Robinson, projectionist and television engineer, interview for the BECTU History Project with Alan Larson, March 23, 1998. 84. Horace Judge, Associated First National Pictures, to Rev J Haworth, Dartmoor Prison, Films and Cinematograph: apparatus, safety precautions etc., National Archives, July 1923. 85. Daily Telegraph, “Safer Cinema Halls,” February 1, 1932, p.6. 86. Robinson, BECTU History Project. 87. Mickey Hickey, projectionist and sound recordist, interview for the BECTU History Project. Date unknown. 88. Eileen Janes Yeo, “Introduction” in Radical Feminity:  Women’s Self-​ Representation in the Public Sphere, ed. Eileen Janes Yeo (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 1. 89. Richter, Home on the Rails, 4. 90. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon:  Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 91. Stamp, Moviestruck Girls, 25. 92. Daily Telegraph, “South-​Western Railway Murder: Resumed Inquest,” March 17, 1897, p.4.

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Notes to Pages 130–134 93. Daily Telegraph, “Brighton Railway Outrage,” July 18, 1896, p.7. 94. Daily Telegraph, “Tunnel Outrage,” January 15, 1907, p.9. 95. Daily Mail, “Fire in a Music Hall,” September 21, 1903, p.3. 96. Daily Mirror, “Terrible Railway Smash in Wales,” October 4, 1904, p.3. 97. Times, “Cinema Fire in Irish Village,” September 7, 1926, p.12. 98. Ibid. 99. Daily Mirror, “Girls in Flames Leap from Blazing Film Store,” September 10, 1927, p.3. 100. Ibid. 101. Daily Mirror, “Sobbing Witness,” September 13, 1927, p.2. 102. Daily Mail, “Traffic in Women,” November 17, 1927, p.5 103. Kristen Whissel, Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology and the Silent Cinema (London: Duke University Press, 2008), 175. 104. Daily Mail, “Wives May Not be Beaten,” November 5, 1927, p.8 105. Spatial terms often have been used to describe women’s lives, with language sorting women into chaste and unchaste categories, and reducing females to stereotypes. For example, Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own articulates the intersections between geography and gender not only in her central proposition, but also her encounters with lawns, libraries and colleges. In the Second World War, recruits in the Women’s Army Services were referred to as ‘the groundsheets of the army,’ another spatial, objectifying metaphor that implied female promiscuity. See Lucy Noakes, Women in the British Army: War and the Gentle Sex, 1907–​1948 (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), 18. And an allegedly immoral woman might be called ‘baggage’; an object carried on journeys. Thus women’s access to space was linguistically determined in patriarchal terms. The phrase ‘baggage’ cast judgement on women who broke the boundaries of convention, while simultaneously containing the female body within a dominant, masculine-​oriented culture. 106. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 21. 107. Illustrated London News, “Ensign Photography,” August 31, 1921, p.252. 108. Daily Mirror, “The Modern Girl ‘Travels Light,’” September 1, 1927, p.14. 109. Ibid. 110. Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 27. 111. Ibid. 112. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 16. 113. Daily Mail, “Safe British Railways,” August 7, 1926, p.8. 114. Lord Monkswell, “The Train is Still the Safest Way to Travel,” Sunday Express, October 14, 1928, p.14. 115. Daily Telegraph, “Biggest Cinema in Europe,” December 16, 1930, p.8 116. Times, “Train’s Crash into Buffers,” March 1, 1928, p.11.

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Notes to Pages 134–143 117. Times, “Mishap to Suburban Train,” July 4, 1929, p.11. 118. Daily Mirror, “Workman Killed by Train,” April 10, 1932, p.10; Daily Mirror, “Goods Train Guard Killed,” May 13, 1937, p.11. 119. Daily Mirror, “Train Kills Mother and Her Baby,” April 4, 1934, p.3; Daily Mirror, “Riddle of Girl Under Train,” April 21, 1934, p.13; Daily Mirror, “Girl With Red Beret Killed in fall From Train,” May 17, 1935, p.1. 120. Women were given equal enfranchisement (the voting age for women was lowered to twenty one) in 1928. 121. The lost films (unavailable for public view in the UK) are Rome Express (Walter Forde, UK, 1930); The Ghost Train (Walter Forde, UK, 1931), which exists only as a fragment; Cock O’ The North (UK, O Mitchell and C Sanderson, 1935); The Private Secretary (Henry Edwards, UK, 1935); The Silent Passenger (Reginald Denham, UK, 1935); and The Last Journey (Bernard Vorhaus, UK, 1936). 122. Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993), 72. 123. The line used was Basingstoke to Alton, which was closed in 1932. Two further films were shot on this line – Seven Sinners in 1936 and Oh! Mr Porter (Marcel Varnel, UK, 1937). 124. Blackmail is regarded as the first British movie using a sound-​ on-​ film recording process; rather sound being recorded on disc. Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, UK, 1929). 125. This was Viscountess Astor, who was also the first woman elected to parliament. See Daily Telegraph, “Voice of Woman,” February 25, 1920, p.11. 126. By 1930, one thousand cinemas were equipped for sound in Britain. See J  R Whitley, “One Thousand Talkie Cinemas,” Daily Mirror, February 3, 1930, p.20. 127. Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (Revised Edition) (Columbia, NY: Columbia University Press, 2002), 278. 128. Ibid. 129. Madeleine Carroll, “De-​ Bunking My Serenity,” Kinematograph Weekly, June 7, 1935, p.27. 130. Ibid. 131. The narrative of Seven Sinners was based on The Wrecker. 132. Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 27. 133. Liz Millward argues that throughout the interwar period, ‘heteronormativity’ –​the alignment of biological and performed gender identities –​was central to thinking about men and women’s roles. There were two gendered characteristics to which people conformed, and any person who stepped outside their conventional role was considered abnormal. See Millward, Women in British Imperial Airspace.

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Notes to Pages 147–152 134. Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1. 135. Sara Horell’s investigation of household labour reveals the link between technology and time saving as fiction: while appliances made chores easier, women carried out domestic tasks more often as a result. Sara Horrell, “The Household and Labour Market,” Work and Pay in Twentieth Century Britain, 131. 136. Ian Gazeley, “Manual Work and Pay, 1900–​70,” Work and Pay in Twentieth Century Britain, 66. 137. Glucksmann, Women Assemble, 7 138. H G Wells, “Women’s Capacity in the Modern ‘Man-​Made’ World,” Daily Telegraph, February 12, 1932, p.12. 139. Ibid. 140. Glucksmann, Women Assemble. 141. Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 3. 142. Manchester Guardian, “Women Workers,” June 6, 1946, p.4.

Chapter Four: Child Evacuees and Rural Modernity in the Second World War 1. Frank Tilsely, “Susan is Spoiled,” Manchester Guardian, March 7, 1941, p.10. 2. The evacuation scheme was not limited to children, as disabled adults, teachers and the mothers of children aged under five were also included. However, this chapter focuses on children aged over five and under fifteen, who left home with chaperones (such as teachers) but were separated from their parents. 3. Karen Lury, The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairytales (London: I.B.Tauris, 2010), 6; Vicky Lebeau, Childhood and Cinema (London:  Reaktion Books, 2008), 19; Emma Wilson, Cinema’s Missing Children (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2003), 1. 4. Lury, The Child in Film, 6. 5. Claudia Castaneda, Figurations  –​Child, Bodies, Worlds (Durham:  Duke University Press, 2006), 5–​6. 6. Jenny Bavidge, “Vital Victims: Senses of Children in the Urban” in Children in Culture:  Revisited Further Approaches to Childhood, ed. Karín Lesnik-​ Oberstein (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 209. 7. Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces:  Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (London: University of California Press, 2001). 8. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey:  The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkley, CA:  University of California Press, 1977), 48.

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Notes to Pages 152–157 9. Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity:  Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–​ 1930 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008), 132. 10. Carolyn Steedman reveals how the figure of the ‘street child’ emerged in the 1830s, which would trade goods and entertain adults for money. Owing to social conditions and the high number of children aged below fifteen in the British population in the nineteenth century, she claims young people were ‘highly visible on the streets.’ Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations:  Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–​1930 (London: Virago Press, 1995), 117–​126. 11. Dorothy Kirby, “Some Famous Women of Today: Margaret Bondfield” in Girls’ Own Annual 60, ed. Gladys M Spratt (London: Lutterworth Press, 1939), 238. 12. Bavidge, “Vital Victims,” Children in Culture, 208. 13. Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock, UK, 1936). 14. Joan Snelling, “Queen by Proxy” in Girls’ Own Annual 64, ed. Gladys M Spratt (London: Lutterworth Press, 1943), 16. 15. Frances Cowen, “All on Her Own” in Girls’ Own Annual 61, ed. Gladys M Spratt (London: Lutterworth Press, 1940), 413–​414. 16. “Glyn’s Streamlined Christmas Party” in Greyfriars Holiday Annual for Boys and Girls, 43–​46 (London: Fleetway House, 1939). 17. Dennis, Cities in Modernity, 133. 18. Sylvia Joyce Hadley, memoir, Imperial War Museum, 1981, 9–​10. 19. A D Kerr, “Shunting by Night” in Boy’s Own Paper 64, Robert Harding (ed), (London: Lutterworth Press, 1942), 19. 20. Illustrated London News, “Events and Personalities of the Week,” October 21, 1939, p.613. 21. William A Bagley, “Fireworks that Save Lives,” in Modern Boy’s Annual, 87. 22. Charles Walker, “Joe Stoker Wins His Spurs” in Modern Boy’s Annual 62, ed. Robert Harding (London: Lutterworth Press, 1939), 80–​81. 23. Manchester Guardian, “ ‘Stay Away from Danger’:  Advice to the Evacuated,” September 9, 1939, p.4. 24. Sylvia Joyce Hadley, Memoir, Imperial War Museum, 1980, 4. 25. Owain Jones, “Idylls and Otherness” in Cinematic Countrysides, ed. Robert Fish (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). 26. Anonymous, “In Nature’s Realm: Magic of Autumn” in Modern Boy’s Annual 62, 94. 27. Simon Flynn, “Out with Romany:  Simulating the Natural in BBC Radio’s Children Hour, 1932–​1943,” Children in Culture. 28. Ibid., 187. 29. Manchester Guardian, “Children in the Danger Areas,” October 30, 1939, p.10. 30. Northants Evening Telegraph, “Plans in This District,” August 31, 1939, p.1.

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Notes to Pages 157–162 31. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–​1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 139. 32. Joan Verney, “Other People’s Ways,” Girls Own Annual 61, 398. 33. Lebeau, Childhood and Cinema, 10. 34. Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in the Western Society Since 1500, second edition (London: Pearson Longman, 2005), 172. 35. Ibid., 179. 36. Stuart Robertson, “Evacuated!” Girls’ Own Annual 61, 504. 37. Times, “Railways in War Time,” November 16, 1939, p.9. 38. Constance M Evans, “The Snakeskin Case,” Girls’ Own Annual 61, 39. 39. “In Nature’s Realm: Lines of Communication,” Modern Boy’s Annual 62, 261. 40. Flynn, “Out with Romany,” Children in Culture, 194. 41. Dorothy M Richardson, “Films for Children” in Close Up, 1927–​1933: Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 283–​284. 42. Ian Wojcik-​Andrews, Children’s Films:  History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000), 27. 43. Ian Conrich, “Kitchen Cinema: Early Children’s Film Shows in London’s East End,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 2, no. 2 (2005): 290–​298. 44. Sarah J Smith, “A Riot at the Palace: Children’s Cinema-​going in 1930s Britain,” The Journal of British Cinema and Television 2, no. 2 (2005): 279. 45. Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society, 191. 46. Ibid., 286. 47. Times, “Children Kept in London,” June 6, 1941, p.2. 48. Times, “Evacuation in Practice,” August 8, 1939, p.7. 49. Times, “The Children Move Off,” September 2, 1939, p.12. 50. London Board of Transport, Evacuation of London, Transport for London Archive, c1941–​1945, 2. 51. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 64. 52. Eric Ravillious, Train Landscape, 1940. 53. Graham Greene, Stamboul Train (1955; repr., London: Vintage, 2004), 9 and 13. The story was written in 1931. 54. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 38; Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 34. 55. Frank Richards, “The Mystery of the Christmas Candles,” Greyfriars Holiday Annual for Boys and Girls, 109. 56. Ibid. 57. Schivelbusch discusses the various nineteenth-​century maladies that affected railway travellers in The Railway Journey, 136. 58. Private Papers of Miss P M Donald, Letter to the Imperial War Museum, Imperial War Museum, September 1989.

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Notes to Pages 162–166 59. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 8–​9. 60. Daily Mail, “Getting Them Out,” September 25, 1940, p.2. 61. Charles Sutton, “Can You Ration Travel?” Daily Mail, November 22, 1941, p.3. 62. “Railway Giants of the New World and the Old,” May, 8; E R Yarhan, “Railhead Soldier,” August, 4–​8; and Leslie Dixon, “The Railway Marches On,” October, 8 and 11, all in Boy’s Own Paper 64. 63. See Modern Boys Annual 62; Boy’s Own Paper, 63–​66. 64. H Worsley, “Testing the Railway Buffers,” Modern Boy’s Annual 62, 191. 65. W J Bassett-​Lowke, “Are you a Model Railway Enthusiast?” Modern Boy’s Annual 62, 66; Walker, “Joe Stoker Wins His Spurs,” 80–​83. 66. See, for example, Dorothy Kirby, “Some Famous Women of Today:  Jean Batten” in Girls’ Own Annual 60, ed. Gladys M Spratt (London: Lutterworth Press, 1939), 30–​33, 40, and Dorothy Carter, “May’s Monoplane,” 453–​456 in the same volume. 67. John Beckerson and John K Walton, “Selling Air: Marketing the Intangible at British Resorts” in Histories of Tourism: Representation, Identity, Conflict, ed. John K Walton, (Clevedon, Canada: Channel View Publications, 2005), 55–​56. 68. Richardson observed that upper- and middle-​class children were usually ‘away from town’ in the summer, as their parents could afford family holidays and excursions. Richardson, “Films for Children,” Close Up, 283. 69. Evacuees –​Children Go Happily (British Movietone News, UK, 1939). 70. In her work on childhood popular culture, Karín Lesnik-​Oberstein problematises children’s voices and agency in texts that are usually mediated by (through scripts, camerawork, broadcast, etc.), or for, adults. While she suggests that it is impossible to ‘diagnose’ a correct or incorrect voice for a child’s articulation, there is a question as to whether ‘the child is not speaking the words it has been told to speak’. In the newsreels mentioned in this chapter, there is no evidence to indicate that the children’s views were represented; the depiction of evacuees is from an adult perspective. See Karín Lesnik-​Oberstein, “Introduction: Voice, Agency and the Child,” Children in Culture, 9–​10. 71. Owing to the scale of the evacuation scheme, London children did not find out where their billets were located until arriving at their destinations. 72. Children Re-​evacuated (British Pathé, UK, 1940). 73. On the Home Front (British Pathé, UK, 1940). 74. Private Papers of L McDermott-​Brown, Memoir, Imperial War Museum, December 1, 1944. 75. Private Papers of Mrs M Dineen, Diary, Imperial War Museum, September 1, 1939. 76. Joyce Ward, Sunshine and a Few Heavy Showers:  The Wartime Diary of a London Evacuee, Imperial War Museum, 10. 77. L McDermott-​Brown, December 1, 1944.

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Notes to Pages 166–171 78. Ibid. 79. Bryan Breed, I Know a Rotten Place:  An Evacuee’s Story Forty Years On (London: John Clare Books, 1980), 51. 80. Times, “Children in New Homes,” September 4, 1939, p.5. 81. P M Donald, Letter to the Imperial War Museum, September 1989. 82. Joan Snelling, “Queen by Proxy,” Girls’ Own Annual 64, 6. 83. Stuart Robertson, “Evacuated!” Girls’ Own Annual 61, 504. 84. Tilsely, “Susan is Spoiled,” p.10; Children Re-​evacuated (British Pathé, UK, 1940). 85. Express and Echo, “City Talk,” October 12, 1940, p.5. 86. Brian White, Daily Mail Nipper Annual 1940 (London:  Associated Newspapers, 1940), 2–​12. 87. Ibid., 12–​13. 88. Jean Stirling Mackinlay and Harcourt Williams, “Letter to the Editor,” Times, September 15, 1939, p.3. 89. Fife Herald, “More Evacuees Expected,” September 13, 1939, p.4. 90. Falkirk Herald, “7000 Evacuees Back to City,” October 18, 1939, p.5. 91. Sid G Hedges, “Helping the ARP:  Jobs That You Can Do,” Modern Boy’s Annual 62, 103. 92. Ibid. 93. Cowen, “Sonia’s Stolen Days,” Girls’ Own Annual 62, 19–​23. 94. Ibid., 20. 95. Confirm or Deny (Archie Mayo, USA, 1941). 96. Michael Lawrence, “ ‘Bombed into Stardom!’  –​Roddy McDowell, ‘British Evacuee Star’ in Hollywood,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 12, no. 1 (2015): 45–​62. 97. Evacuation Difficulties (British Pathé, UK, 1940). 98. Annette Kuhn, An Everyday Magic:  Cinema as Cultural Memory (London: I.B.Tauris, 2002), 17. 99. Breed, I Know a Rotten Place, 52. 100. Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain 1930–​1939 (London and New  York:  Routledge, 1984), 13 and 18; Stuart Hanson, From Silent Screen to Multiscreen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain since 1896 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 65. 101. Dumbo (Ben Sharpsteen, et  al, USA, 1941); Henry V (Lawrence Olivier, UK, 1944). 102. Private Papers of Miss S J Parkes, Diary, Imperial War Museum, July 3, 1940. The films she views are Smashing the Spy Ring (Christy Cabanne, USA, 1938) and Overland Express (Drew Eberson, USA, 1938). 103. Trevor Holloway, “How Movie Pictures and Cartoons are Made,” Modern Boy’s Annual 62, 204–​206.

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Notes to Pages 171–174 Evans, “The Snakeskin Case,” Girls’ Own Annual 60, 87. Deanna Durbin, “My Own Story,” Girls’ Own Annual 60, January-​June. Boys’ and Girls’ Cinema Clubs Annual, “About the Cinema Clubs,” 1948, 39. Fife Herald, “Entertaining Evacuees,” September 20, 1939, p.5. Graham Stanford, “Women Have ‘The Big City Blues,’ ” Daily Mail, October 15, 1940, p.3. 109. Times, “The Evacuated Children,” December 23, 1939, p.3. 110. Manchester Guardian, “Parties for the Evacuees,” December 23, 1940, p.2. 111. P B Redmayne, “Points from Letters:  Cinematograph Equipment,” Times, September 27, 1939, p.6. 112. Oscar Deutsch, “Letter to the Editor:  Cinemas and Evacuation,” Times, November 23, 1939, p.6. Many evacuees and local schoolchildren had to share classroom facilities, so attended school either in the morning or the afternoon to avoid overcrowding and maintain separate curricula. 113. Express and Echo, “London Children Spend a Jolly Evening,” January 4, 1940, p.8; Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, “Film Shows to Tour Villages,” p.10. 114. Portsmouth Evening News, “Entertaining Evacuees,” September 23, 1939, p.2. 115. Reading Mercury, “Christmas in the Reception Areas,” December 9, 1939, p.7. 116. Bedfordshire Times and Independent, January 2, 1942, p.3; Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser, “School Parties,” January 2, 1942, p.4. 117. Daily Mail, “Our Village Hall,” October 30, 1939, p.7. 118. Yorkshire Evening Post, “A Way to Help Leeds Children,” December 23, 1942, p.6. 119. Ibid. 120. Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, “Special Show: Evacuees Entertained at Odeon,” January 3, 1942, p.7. 121. M C Parker, “Letter to the Editor: Christmas Treats,” Times, December 14, 1939, p.6. 122. Opposition to young people watching films and visiting the cinema was not new. As Hugh Cunningham asserts, ‘there had been much fear throughout the twentieth century that films would corrupt the young.’ See Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society, 188. Bernhard Reiger expands on the issue of children’s cinema spectatorship, proposing that ‘[f]‌ilm purportedly glorifying condemned forms of conduct were said to introduce children and adolescents to the worlds of crime and sexual depravity. Once on the slippery slope of cinematic spectatorship, young people would act out the fantasies they had witnessed on screen through unlawful behaviour ranging from theft to rape and murder.’ See Bernhard Reiger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890–​1945 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2005), 94. 123. North Devon Journal, “Secondary Education for All,” October 17, 1940, p.6. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

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Notes to Pages 174–180 124. E H Hutton, “To the Editor: Welshmen and the War,” Manchester Guardian, May 28, 1940, p.10. 125. Richardson, “Films for Children,” Close Up, 283. 126. Manchester Guardian, “Our London Correspondent,” December 21, 1940, p.6. 127. Wells Journal, “Happy Time for Children in Villages,” January 9, 1942, p.3. 128. Alice in Wonderland (Norman Z McLeod, USA, 1933). 129. Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser, “Evacuees Party,” January 7, 1944, p.5; Northampton Mercury, “Hartwell,” January 21, 1944, p.2; Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser, “Films and ‘Candy’,” August 5, 1944, p.2. 130. Bedfordshire Times and Independent, “Kiddies and the Rabbit,” December 19, 1941, p.6. 131. The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, USA, 1938). 132. Andrew Weir, “Cinemas Report Excellent Business,” Leeds Mercury, September 20, 1939, p.6. 133. Luton News and Bedfordshire Chronicle, “Plenty of Fun for Evacuees,” December 29, 1939, p.10. 134. Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette, “Christmas with Evacuees,” November 22, 1941, p.2. 135. Manchester Guardian, “More Children Leave London,” July 8, 1944, p.6. 136. Deutsch, “Letter to the Editor.” 137. Graham Stanford, “Mrs Walker of the Cinema,” Daily Mail, November 14, 1940, p.3. 138. Ibid. 139. Daily Mail, “Evacuees ‘Take Over’ Houses,” January 20, 1941, p.5. 140. William Hickey, “High Life at Dusk,” Daily Express, October 1, 1940, p.4. 141. Dundee Courier, “Blase Evacuees,” September 18, 1939, p.4. 142. Ibid. 143. Nottingham Evening Post, “Unexpected Peril,” February 28, 1940, p.4. 144. Western Gazette, “The Carlton Theatre,” December 22, 1939, p.4; Bedfordshire Times and Independent, “Cravenhurst,” January 9, 1942, p.2. 145. Burnley Express, “Cinema Show,” November 18, 1939, p.4; Hartlepool Mail, “The Evacuees,” November 23, 1939, p.4; Sussex Agricultural Express, “Ringmer,” November 24, 1939, p.8. 146. Chelmsford Chronicle, “Village Films,” December 29, 1939, p.2. 147. Express and Echo, “London Children Spend a Jolly Evening.” 148. Coventry Herald, “Films for Stoneleigh Evacuees,” September 23, 1939, p.8. 149. Breed, I Know a Rotten Place, 58. 150. Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 180–185 151. Simon Popple and Joe Kember, Early Cinema: From Factory Gate to Dream Factory (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 50. 152. Ibid., 59. 153. Dundee Courier, “Film Shows for Evacuees,” October 2, 1939, p.2. 154. For a history of Bioscope shows, see Vanessa Toulmin, “Telling the Tale: The Story of the Fairground Bioscope Shows and the Showmen Who Operated Them,” Film History 6, no. 2 (1994): 234. 155. Edinburgh Evening News, “Country Cinemas,” October 9, 1939, p.3. 156. Conrich, “Kitchen Cinema,” 290–​298. 157. Bywayman, “Pilgrims Awheel,” in Boy’s Own Paper 64, April, 12. 158. Ibid. 159. Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser, “St George’s Boys’ Club,” December 15, 1939, p.2. 160. Writing about cinema propaganda in wartime, Nicholas Reeves records ‘three propaganda themes that had been identified by the Ministry of Information,’ which were: ‘ “[w]‌hat Britain is fighting for,” “[h]ow Britain fights,” and “[t] he need for sacrifice if the fight is to be won”’. Nicholas Reeves, The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth or Reality? (London: Cassell, 1999), 152. 161. Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser, “At the Cinema,” January 19, 1940, p.6. See The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Richard Thorpe, USA, 1939). 162. Taunton Courier, and Western Advertiser, “Children Entertained,” January 18, 1941, p.4. 163. Ballymena Observer, “Evacuation Officials’ Thoughtfulness,” December 26, 1941, p.6. 164. Smith, “A Riot at the Palace,” 287. 165. Child Evacuees from Brighton (British Pathé, UK, c.1940); Front Line London (British Pathé, UK, 1944). 166. Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, “Film Shows to Tour Villages,” March 9, 1940, p.10. 167. Richardson, “Films for Children,” Close Up, 285. 168. “A Film Worth Seeing: Gulliver’s Travels.” 169. Boys’ and Girls’ Cinema Clubs Annual “About the Cinema Clubs –​And About Choosing Films for You.” 170. Ibid., 38–​39. 171. Cunningham, Children and Childhood in the Western Society, 192 and 176. 172. Daily Mail, “London ‘Liberates’ Itself,” September 5, 1944, p.3. 173. Frances Cowen, “The Man in Air Force Blue,” Girls’ Own Annual 62, 219. 174. “A Film Worth Seeing: Gulliver’s Travels,” Boy’s Own Paper 63, May, 6; “A Film Worth Seeing: Geronimo,” Boy’s Own Paper 63, June, 6; “Films of the Month,” Girls’ Own Annual 64.

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Notes to Pages 185–191 175. Manchester Guardian, “Rival Claims,” May 17, 1945, p.3. 176. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion:  Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 51. 177. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 197 and 42. 178. Richardson, “Films for Children,” Close Up, 285–​286. 179. Giuliana Bruno, “Streetwalking Around Plato’s Cave,” in Feminisms in the Cinema, Laura Pietropaolo, and Ada Testaferri (eds) (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 155.

Chapter Five: The Cinema Train, Modernity and Empire 1. New Berth for Bananas (British Pathé, UK, 1938). 2. For example, in motion pictures produced by the Crown Film Unit. See Martin Stollery, “The Last Roll of the Dice:  Morning, Noon and Night, Empire and the Historiography of the Crown Film Unit” in Film and the End of Empire, ed. Lee Grieveson and Colin McCabe (London: British Film Institute, 2011), 35–​54. 3. Railway Gazette, “Films on an Express Train,” May 24, 1935, p.380. 4. Kinematograph Weekly, “Film Shows on Scots Express. Mayor Inaugurates New Pathé Service,” March 5, 1936, p.29. 5. Kinematograph Weekly, “Railway Kinema’s 1000th Show. Pathé LNER Experiment a Success,” November 21, 1935, p.39. 6. John Beckerson and John K Walton, “Selling Air: Marketing the Intangible at British Resorts” in Histories of Tourism: Representation, Identity, Conflict, ed. John K Walton (Clevedon, Canada:  Channel View Publications, 2005), 56. 7. Brief Encounter (David Lean, UK, 1948); Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, USA, 1945). 8. Cinema on Train (British Pathé, UK, 1935). 9. Charles Musser, “The Travel Genre in 1903–​1904: Moving Towards Fictional Narrative” in Early Cinema:  Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990), 123. 10. Christian Hayes, “Phantom Carriages: Reconstructing Hale’s Tours and the Virtual Travel Experience,” Early Popular Visual Culture 7, no. 2 (2009): 186. 11. Philippe Gauthier and Timothy Barnard, “The Movie Theatre as an Institutional Space and Framework of Signification:  Hale’s Tours and Film Historiography,” Film History 21 (2009): 326 12. Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 191–196 13. Cornishman, “More ‘Days in Cornwall’,” May 23, 1907, p.4. 14. Rinking World & Picture Theatre News, untitled, December 25, 1909, p.14. 15. Ibid. 16. Giuliana Bruno, “Streetwalking Around Plato’s Cave” in Feminisms in the Cinema, eds. Laura Pietropaolo and Ada Testaferri (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 152. 17. Ibid. 18. Vanessa Toulmin, “Telling the Tale:  The Story of the Fairground Bioscope Shows and the Showmen Who Operated Them,” Film History 6, no.  2 (1994): 234. 19. Luke McKernan, “Diverting Time:  London Cinemas and Their Audiences, 1906–​1914,” The London Journal 31, (2007): 130. 20. Jon Burrows, “Penny Pleasures II:  Indecency, Anarchy and Junk Films in London’s ‘Nickelodeons’, 1906–​1914,” Film History 16, no. 2, (2004): 193. 21. British Army Travelling Cinema in WW1, 1914–​1918 (British Pathé, UK, c.1914–​1918). 22. Daily Telegraph, “Motor Cinemas Ltd.,” February 2, 1920, p.2. 23. Cristina Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times (Stanford, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 92. 24. Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society: From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin, (London: I.B.Tauris, 2001), 69. 25. Ibid, 68. 26. Dziga Vertov, Kino-​Eye:  The Writings of Dziga Vertov, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 29. 27. Aberdeen Journal, “Cinemas on Trains,” June 15, 1923, p.3. 28. Dundee Evening Telegraph, “Cinema Show in Train,” April 30, 1923, p.9. 29. Times, “An Example to the World”, March 8, 1924, p.6. 30. Never Stop Railway (British Pathé, UK, 1925). 31. Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (London: Penguin Books, 1968). 32. Nottingham Evening Post, “Cinema on a Train,” March 12, 1924, p.4. 33. Railway Gazette, “Films on an Express Train,” March 14, 1924, p.380. 34. Ibid. 35. Manchester Guardian, “Kinema on Train,” March 12, 1924, p.9. 36. Horsham Times, “Cinema Show on Train,” May 23, 1924, p.5. 37. Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, “Cinema on a Train,” March 13, 1924, p.7. 38. Manchester Guardian, “Kinema on Train.” 39. Times, “Films in a Train”. The Horsham Times noted that the auditorium was made dark using blinds and curtains, suggesting that the carriage used for the movie theatre was not structurally altered to remove the windows. See The Horsham Times, “Cinema Show on Train.”

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Notes to Pages 197–200 40. Horsham Times, “Cinema Show on Train.” 41. Yorkshire Evening Post, “Artificial and Real,” April 8, 1925, p.8. 42. Illustrated London News, “The ‘Flying Scotsman’ as a Cinema: The First Film in a Train,” March 22, 1924, p.497. 43. J M Turner, Rain, Steam, Speed (1844). 44. That The Horsham Times reported on the cinema train attests to the invention’s far-​reaching public appeal. Horsham is a town located in Sussex in the south of England; the movie coach’s route ran north from London and so was not local to the publication. 45. Grantham Journal, “Cinema on a Train,” March 15, 1924, p.11. 46. Times, “Films in a Train”, March 13, 1924, p.12; Manchester Guardian, “Kinema on Train”; Illustrated London News, “The ‘Flying Scotsman’ as a Cinema: The First Film in a Train”; Railway Gazette, “Films on an Express Train”. 47. Railway Gazette, “Films on an Express Train”. 48. Yorkshire Evening Post, “Cinemas in Trains,” April 21, 1925, p.8. 49. Dundee Courier, “Cinema Show on a Train,” November 26, 1926, p.7. I have so far been unable to trace Our Britain in the archives and so its antecedents are unknown. 50. Ibid. 51. Dundee Evening Telegraph, “Cinema Show in a Train,” October 26, 1927, p.4. The EMB was a government initiative established in 1926 to encourage people to buy products from the colonies by showcasing imported goods on screen and in print. See Tom Rice, “Exhibiting Africa: British Instructional Films and the Empire Series (1925–​8),” Film and the End of Empire, 116. 52. Derby Daily Telegraph, “Cinema in a Train,” October 24, 1927, p.3. 53. Aberdeen Journal, “Cinema on Train,” October 24, 1927, p.5. 54. All the films were produced by the Empire Marketing Board, c.1927. 55. Dundee Courier, “Guard’s Van as a Theatre,” October 24, 1927, p.4. 56. Aberdeen Journal, “Cinema on Train,” October 24, 1927, p.5. 57. Aberdeen Journal, “Cinema on Trains,” December 13, 1929, p.3. 58. Sheffield Independent, “Cinema Show on Express Train,” April 10, 1931, p.1; Yorkshire Evening Post, “Young Dick Turpins’ Adventure,” September 14, 1933, p.7. 59. The Wrecker (Géza von Bolváry, UK, 1929). 60. Illustrated London News, “Vauxhall,” “Crossley and Ruston-​Hornsby,” “Wolsey,” “Lincoln,” “Lancaster,” “Bean,” “Standard,” “Overland,” “CAV,” “Armstrong Siddeley,” “Rover,” “Bayliss Thompson,” March 15, pp. 471–​476 and 479. The paper also incorporated a weekly feature entitled “Chronicle of the Car.” 61. Ibid. 62. Christian Wolmar, Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain (London: Atlantic Books, 2007), 236.

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Notes to Pages 200–204 63. Manchester Guardian, “Television on a Train,” February 2, 1932, p.11. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Daily Mirror, “Premier as Rail Guard. Britain’s First Musical Train,” April 28, 1934, p.12. 67. Ibid. 68. Daily Mirror, “2-​Way Speech with New Radio-​Phone. Talk, Switch Over  –​ Then Listen. Train Test,” June 28, 1935, p.2. 69. Times, “Cinema on Express Train,” May 25, 1935, p.9. 70. Manchester Guardian, “Telegram from Train,” May 23, 1935, p.11. 71. Ibid. 72. Railway Gazette, “LMS Furniture Removals  –​Modern Fashion,” April 12, 1935, p.33. 73. Daily Telegraph, “Film Premier in a Liner,” May 27, 1935, p.11. 74. The Blue Riband was the international prize awarded to the ship with the fastest time for an Atlantic crossing. 75. Daily Mirror, “Talkies in the Queen Mary,” June 25, 1935 p.7. 76. Kinematograph Weekly, “Royal Mail Goes G-​BE,” January 2, 1936, p.13. 77. Cock o’ the North (Oswald Mitchell, UK, 1935); The Silent Passenger (Reginald Denham, 1935); The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, UK, 1935). 78. An article in Kinematograph Weekly reported the atrium of the Shepherd’s Bush Pavilion was turned into a tube station to promote Bulldog Jack. Kinematograph Weekly, “Kinema Vestibule as Tube Station,” September 26, 1935, p.47. 79. Ken Roe, “ABC Baker Street,” http://​cinematreasures.org/​theaters/​13070 (accessed November 5, 2013). 80. Scottish Cinemas, “Norwood,” http://​www.scottishcinemas.org.uk/​glasgow/​ norwood.html (accessed November 17, 2016). 81. Times, “Cinema on Express Train”. 82. Railway Gazette, “Films on an Express Train,” May 24, 1935, p.1045. 83. Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain 1930–​1939 (London and New York: Routledge, 1984), 11. 84. Ibid. 85. Populstat, United Kingdom, Historical Demographical Data of the Whole Country, 2003, http://​www.populstat.info/​Europe/​unkingdc.htm (accessed July 1, 2012). 86. Manchester Guardian, “Talkies on Trains,” May 25, 1935, p.12. 87. Cinema on Train (British Pathé, UK, 1935). 88. Ibid. 89. Lincolnshire Echo, “Historic First Run,” May 25, 1935, p.5.

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Notes to Pages 204–209 90. The accent was left from Pathé. This potentially was an aesthetic choice. But this may also have helped identify the once French-​owned company as British when promoting the vehicle both at home and abroad. 91. Kinematograph Weekly, “Film Shows for Train Travellers. Pathe-​ LNER Experiment a Success,” May 30, 1935, p.37. 92. Railway Gazette, “An LNER Travelling Cinema,” May 31, 1935, p.1085. 93. Kinematograph Weekly, “Film Shows for Train Travellers. Pathe-​ LNER Experiment a Success.” 94. Railway Gazette, “Films on an Express Train.” 95. Times, “Films in a Train.” 96. Manchester Guardian, “Talkies on Trains”; Lincolnshire Echo, “Historic First Run,” May 25, 1935, p.5. 97. Railway Gazette, “An LNER Travelling Cinema.” 98. Lincolnshire Echo, “Historic First Run.” 99. Alnwick Mercury, “Enjoying the Cinema Show,” February 18, 1939, p.12. 100. Mass Observation, Bolton Odeon Opening, Mass Observation, August 28, 1937. 101. Kinematograph Weekly, “Pathé Equipment’s New Premises,” June 17, 1937, p.42. 102. LNER, First Class Dining Car Engineering Drawing, National Railway Museum, 1937. 103. Ibid. 104. Railway Gazette, “New LNER Restaurant Cars,” April 12, 1935, p.679. 105. For example in the 1935 LNER vestibule open third, or the 1937 vestibule buffet. 106. Times, “Cinema on Express Train.” 107. Kinematograph Weekly, “Film Shows for Train Travellers. Pathé -​ LNER Experiment a Success.” 108. Manchester Guardian, “Talkies on Trains.” 109. Ibid. 110. Aberdeen Journal, “Cinemas on Trains,” May 29, 1935, p.6. 111. LNER, LNER-​Pathé Cinema Train Programme, National Archives, May 1938. 112. Ibid. 113. Terra Media UK, Cinema Average Ticket Price, Media Statistics, 2008 ed., http://​w ww.terramedia.co.uk/​reference/​statistics/​cinema/​cinema_​ticket_​ prices_​2.htm (accessed July 1, 2012). 114. Observer, “Film Shows on Trains,” June 6, 1937, p.10. 115. Ibid. 116. Kinematograph Weekly, “Film Shows for Train Travellers. Pathe-​ LNER Experiment a Success.”

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Notes to Pages 209–213 117. Railway Gazette, “An LNER Travelling Cinema.” 118. Kinematograph Weekly, “Railway Kinema’s 1000th Show. Pathé LNER Experiment a Success.” 119. Hull Daily Mail, “Train Cinema,” November 16, 1935, p.5. 120. Ibid. 121. Kinematograph Weekly, “Pathé Periodicals. A  Record-​Breaking Year,” and Kinematograph Weekly, “Film Shows on Scots Express. Mayor Inaugurates New Pathé Service,” March 5, 1936, p.29. 122. Kinematograph Weekly, “Pathé Periodicals. A Record-​Breaking Year.” 123. News in a Nutshell (British Pathé, UK 1936). 124. Railway Gazette, “Belgian King in Train Cinema,” December 17, 1937, p.1154. 125. Ibid. 126. Ibid. 127. Observer, “Film Shows on Trains.” 128. Ibid. 129. LMS, Engineering Section, Research Department Report, National Archives, November 17,1937, p.1. 130. Bruno, “Streetwalking Around Plato’s Cave,” 152. 131. LMS, Engineering Section, Research Department Report, National Archives, November 17,1937, p.1. 132. Bruno, “Streetwalking Around Plato’s Cave,” 152. 133. LMS, Engineering Section, Research Department Report, p.1. 134. Jeffrey Bernerd, “Trust the Newsreel as a Feature,” Kinematograph Weekly, January 9, 1936, p.40. 135. Bernstein Questionnaire Report, Mass Observation, February 20, 1937. 136. For example, the Salvation Army used magic lantern slides and films to spread their teaching to the public. See Simon Popple and Joe Kember, Marketing Modernity:  Victorian Popular Shows and Early Cinema (Exeter:  Exeter University Press, 2009), 50. 137. Illustrated London News, “The Camera as Correspondent:  News of Friend and Foe,” February 12, 1916, p.196. 138. Gerald F Sanger, “British Movietone News –​Kinema Patrons Welcome New Movie-​tone Make-​up,” Kinematograph Weekly, November 14, 1935. 139. Ibid. 140. Daily Mail, “The Film Deadlock,” August 5, 1926, p.8. 141. Ibid. 142. Nicholas Pronay, “British Newsreels in the 1930s:  2.  Their Policies and Impact” in Yesterday’s News:  The British Cinema Newsreel Reader, ed. Luke McKernan (London:  British Universities Film and Video Council), 150–​151.

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Notes to Pages 213–221 143. Philip M Taylor, British Democracy in the Twentieth Century:  Selling Propaganda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 92. 144. LNER, LNER-​Pathé Cinema Train Programme. 145. Times, “Cinema on Express Train”. 146. LNER-​Pathé Cinema Train Programme. 147. Their Majesties Tour in Lanarkshire (British Pathé, UK, 1938). 148. New German Ambassador in London (British Pathé, UK, 1938). 149. Hitler in Italy (British Pathé, UK, 1938); Italians Goose-​Step for Hitler (British Pathé, UK, 1938). 150. French Liner Ablaze at Le Havre (British Pathé, UK, 1938). 151. Ninety-​Four Years Old Mrs Anne Budd Takes Her First Flight (British Pathé, UK, 1938). 152. New Defence Balloons (British Pathé, UK, 1938); Demonstration of Kay Autogyro at Southampton (British Pathé, UK, 1938). 153. Ibid. 154. The Emotion Machine (British Pathé, UK, 1938). 155. Boston Marathon (British Pathé, UK, 1938). 156. Blessing the Lambs in Italy (British Pathé, UK, 1938); Dublin Spring Show (British Pathé, UK, 1938). 157. Troy Town (British Pathé, UK, 1938); Novelties (British Pathé, UK, 1938). 158. Daily Mirror, “Cinema Train on Boys’ Tour,” March 10, 1939, p.19. 159. The LSWR Company had ceased to exist in 1923, when the network was incorporated into the GWR. It is thus likely that the surviving company used the coach in the 1940s. 160. Photograph SR Coach, Private Collection of Alan Wilmott, 1941. 161. Ibid. 162. North Devon Journal, “Southern Railway Home Guard Film,” October 3, 1940, p.8. 163. The 1942 Beveridge Report was a government-​instigated investigation into the population’s living conditions that resulted in the formation of the Welfare State in 1948. See Margaret Jones and Rodney Lowe, Beveridge to Blair: The First Fifty Years of the Welfare State, 1948–​98 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2002). 164. Although Letter from an Unknown Woman is a US production, I am including it here because audiences in Britain would have seen the film and likely recognised the hybrid rail and cinema technologies to which the film referred. 165. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey:  The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1977), 31. 166. The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, UK, 1939).

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Notes to Pages 221–229 167. Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity:  Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 5. 168. Alan Wilmott (former projectionist and cinema train designer for British Rail), in discussion with the author, March 2011. 169. British Rail, Letter from the Manager for the Eastern Region of British Transport to the Director of Industrial Relations, May 2, 1958. 170. British Rail, British Rail Correspondence, Private Collection of Alan Wilmott, 1955 and 1978. 171. British Overseas Airways Corporation (now known as British Airways) began screening films during flights in 1971. See Kinematograph Weekly, “BOACS Jumbo Jets to Show Films,” March 13, 1971, p.4. 172. Wilmott, discussion. 173. Kinematograph Weekly, “Pathé Periodicals. A Record-​Breaking Year.” 174. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 24. 175. Penny Sparke, The Modern Interior, (London: Reaktion, 2008), 17. 176. Bruno, “Streetwalking Around Plato’s Cave,” 157. 177. Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (London: Duke University Press, 1997), 250. 178. Kinematograph Weekly, “Films in Train…,” June 13, 1935, p.5. 179. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 31. 180. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion:  Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (London: Verso, 2002), 36. 181. Philip Rosen, Change Mummified:  Cinema, Historicity, Theory (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), xix. 182. Observer, “Film Shows on Trains.” 183. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:  Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 35.

Epilogue 1. Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (1848; repr., Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2008). 2. Robert Louis Stevenson, “From a Railway Carriage,” A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885; repr., New York, NY: Dover Publications, 1992), 41. 3. E W Bligh, “Back to Good Old Trains!” Daily Mirror, February 6, 1930, p.7. 4. Maxim Gorky, “The Lumière Cinematograph” in The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Documents 1896–​1939, eds. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (London: Routledge, 1988). 5. Illustrated London News, “The Camera as War-​Correspondent:  Notes by Photography,” December 4, 1916, p.720.

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Notes to Pages 229–235 6. Illustrated London News, “Consort of the Sixth George in Britain’s Most ‘Spacious Times,’ ” May 15, 1937, p.859. 7. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 10. 8. The Titfield Thunderbolt (Charles Crichton, UK, 1953). 9. Great Exhibition Centenary Official Committee, Festival of Britain 1951, Report on Finance and Organisation, National Archives, 1951, 1. 10. The Story of the Festival of Britain (London:  Sanders, Philips and Co. Ltd., 1952), 4–​5. 11. Ibid, 4. 12. Daily Mail, “Festival Furore,” May 25, 1950, p.1. 13. Ibid., 30. 14. Daily Telegraph, “98,000 Visit Southbank Exhibition,” May 6, 1951, p.1. 15. The Story of the Festival of Britain, 15. 16. Exhibition Reports, Official Exhibitions: The Story of the Festival of Britain, Science. Land Traveller. Campania, National Archives, 1951. 17. Manchester Guardian, “From Horses to Buses to Planes,” May 3, 1951, p.4. 18. The engine, designed for the Indian railway, was transported by road because its wheel gauge was too broad for British tracks. 19. Pleasure Gardens Guide, National Archives, 1951, p.25. 20. Ibid., 21. 21. Ibid., 22. 22. Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass (1871; repr., London: Macmillan Children’s Books, 2011). Illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. 23. The Council of the Festival of Britain, Council Papers 1949, London Buildings to be Cleaned for 1951, Minutes of the 12th Meeting of the Council, National Archives, June 29, 1950. 24. The Story of the Festival of Britain, 12. 25. For example, Rank, Associated British, the London Films-​British Lion group, as well as Sidney Bernstein (the head of the Granada cinema chain) agreed to jointly fund a £250,000 production for the Festival. See Daily Mail, “Britain’s Film Chiefs Unite for Festival,” June 30, 1950, p.3. For more on the use of film at the Festival, see The Council of the Festival of Britain, Films and the Festival of Britain, National Archives, 1950. 26. Daily Mirror, “It’s Britain’s Great Day… and it’ll be just as great on TV!” May 3, 1951, p.2. 27. The Titfield Thunderbolt production folder, British Film Institute, 1953. 28. Ibid. 29. James Hodge, Richard Trevithick:  An Illustrated Life of Richard Trevithick, 1771–​1883 (London: Osprey Publishing, 1973), 23. 30. Times, “A Film About Trains,” March 9, 1953, p.11.

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Notes to Pages 235–238 31. The Titfield Thunderbolt production folder, British Film Institute, 1953. 32. Times, “Railway Plea Against Bus Services,” January 17, 1953, p.2. 33. Daily Telegraph, “Southend Bus Plea Rejected,” May 8, 1953, p.7. 34. Daily Telegraph, “3 ½ Mile Line Reprieved,” September 4, 1953, p.7. 35. Times, “No Reprieve for Isle of Wight Trains,” October 20, 1953, p.5. 36. Times, “Isle of Wight Trains,” October 21, 1953, p.4. 37. Times, “ ‘Mourning’ For Last Train,” January 5, 1953, p.4. 38. Times, “Unpunctual Trains,” March 12, 1953, p.4. 39. Manchester Guardian, “Tory Critics of the Railways,” March 12, p.1. 40. The sample includes twelve months’ worth of stories, four from The Times, four from the Daily Telegraph and four from the Manchester Guardian. In total there were one hundred and sixty-​four articles about the railways, of which a hundred and one were negative. Twenty-​two per cent were more positive stories about railway history, enthusiasts or tourism (a total of thirty-​six stories). Percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number. 41. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey:  The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkley, CA: The University of California Press, 1977), 5 and 70. 42. Times, “Top Hats for Station Masters,” October 28, 1953, p.4. 43. The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchock, UK, 1939); Night Train to Munich (Carol Reed, UK, 1940). 44. Penelope Houston, “The Titfield Thunderbolt,” Sight and Sound 22, no.  4 (1953): 196. 45. In 1954, the Television Act enabled ITV to become the first independent, privately funded television channel in Britain. 46. Colour television was not introduced in Britain until 1967. 47. Charles Barr, Ealing Studios:  A  Movie Book (1977; repr., Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 180–​181. 48. Quadrophenia (Franc Roddam, UK, 1979); Harry Potter (Various, UK, 2001–​2011). 49. Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut, UK, 1966). 50. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, UK, 2002). 51. Times, “Festival Summer,” May 3, 1951, p.5. 52. Times, “The Festival,” May 4, 1951, p.7. 53. Lee Grieveson discusses how wars in Southeast Asia and Africa led to ‘decolonisation’. See Lee Grieveson, “Introduction” in Film and the End of Empire, eds. Lee Grieveson and Colin McCabe (London: British Film Institute, 2011), 2.

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Bibliography Archives Army Medical Services Museum BECTU History Project British Film Institute British Library British Movietone Film Archive British Newspaper Archive British Pathé Film Archive British University Film and Video Council Archive Colonial Film Database East Anglian Film Archive Gaumont Pathé Film Archive Imperial War Museum Mass Observation Collection National Archives National Fairground Archive National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive National Railway Museum New York Public Library New York Transport Museum and Archive Private Collection of Alan Wilmott Screen Archive South East Transport for London Archives

Selected Works Consulted Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1997. First published 1947. ———. The Culture Industry. London: Routledge, 2001. First published 1963. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991.

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Bibliography Ardener, Shirley, ed. Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps. London: Taylor and Francis, 1993. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago and London:  University of Chicago Press, 1958. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howe. London:  Vintage Books, 1980. Bavidge, Jenny. “Vital Victims:  Senses of Children in the Urban.” In Children in Culture, Revisited Further Approaches to Childhood. Edited by Karín Lesnik-​ Oberstein, 208–​222. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Bazin, André. What is Cinema? Volume 1. Los Angeles and Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968. Beaumont, Matthew and Michael Freeman, eds. The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space and the Machine Ensemble. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007. Beaven, Brad. Leisure, Citizenship and Working-​Class Men, 1850–​1945. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin Books, 2008. First published 1936. ———. Walter Benjamin’s Archive. Translated by Esther Leslie. London: Verso, 2007. Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production:  Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2006. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1972. Berridge, Virginia. “Health and Medicine.” In The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–​1950 Volume 3:  Social Agencies and Institutions, edited by F M L Thompson, 171–​242. Cambridge:  University of Cambridge Press, 1990. Bradley, Ian. Believing in Britain:  The Spiritual Identity of Britishness. Oxford: Lion, 2007. Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–​22. Bruno, Giuliana. “Streetwalking Around Plato’s Cave.” In Feminisms in the Cinema, edited by Laura Pietropaolo and Ada Testaferri, 147–​163. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. ———. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. London: Verso, 2002. Burnette, Joyce. Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Burrows, Jon. “Penny Pleasures II: Indecency, Anarchy and Junk Films in London’s ‘Nickelodeons,’ 1906–​1914.” Film History 16, no. 2, (2004): 172–​197. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life:  The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.

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Bibliography Carter, Ian. Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Casey, Emma and Lydia Martens, eds. Gender and Consumption: Domestic Cultures and the Commercialisation of Everyday Life. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2007. Castaneda, Claudia. Figurations –​Child, Bodies, Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Charney, Leo and Vanessa R Schwartz. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1995. Chase, Karen and Michael Levenson. The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000. Christie, Ian. The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World. London: BFI, 1994. Cohen, Deborah. The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–​1939. Berkley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2001. ———. Household Gods: The British and their Possessions. London: Yale University Press, 2006. Conley, Tom. Cartographic Cinema. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1989. Conor, Liz. The Spectacular Modern Woman:  Feminine Visibility in the 1920s. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IA: Indiana University Press, 2004. Conrich, Ian. “Kitchen Cinema: Early Children’s Film Shows in London’s East End.” Journal of British Cinema and Television 2, no. 2 (2005): 290–​298. Cook, Patricia. “Albany Ward and the Development of Cinema Exhibition in England.” Film History 20, no. 3 (2008): 294–​307. Cowman, Krista and Louise A  Jackson, eds. Women and Work Culture:  Britain c.1850–​1950. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2005. Cox, Michael and R A  Gilbert, eds. The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Cherry, Steven. Medical Services and the Hospital in Britain 1860–​1939. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1996. Crafts, Nicholas, Ian Gazeley and Andrew Newell, eds. Work and Pay in Twentieth Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Cunningham, Hugh. Children and Childhood in the Western Society Since 1500, second edition. London: Pearson Longman, 2005. Daley, Caroline, and Melanie Nolan, eds. Suffrage and Beyond:  International Feminist Perspectives. New York, NY: New York University Press, 1994. Daunton, Martin, and Bernhard Rieger, eds. Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late Victorian Era to World War II. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Davidoff, Leonore and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes:  Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–​1850. London: Hutchinson, 1987.

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Bibliography Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit, MI: Black and Red, 1967. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. London: University of California Press, 1984. Dennis, Richard. Cities in Modernity:  Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–​1930. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever:  A  Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. London: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Dimendberg, Edward. “The Will to Motorization:  Cinema, Highways, and Modernity.” October 73 (1995): 90–​137. ———. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive. London: Harvard University Press, 2002. Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997. Ekins, Ashley and Elizabeth Stewart, eds. War Wounds: Medicine and the Trauma of Conflict. Wollombi, Australia: Exisle Publishing Limited, 2011. Esbester, Mike. “Nineteenth-​Century Timetables and the History of Reading.” Book History 12 (2009): 156–​185. Evans, A K B and J V Gough. The Impact of the Railway on Society in Britain: Essays in Honour of Jack Simmons. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2003. Farmer, Richard. The Utility Dream Palace: Cinemas and Cinemagoing in Wartime Britain, 1939–​1945. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. Foucault, Michel. Aesthetics: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–​1984 Volume 2. Edited by James D Faubion. London: Penguin Books, 1994. Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text, no.25/​26 (1990): 56–​80. Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things:  Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. London: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. London: Wordsworth, 1997. First published 1900. ———. “The Uncanny.” In The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 14, Art and Literature, edited by Richard Wollheim, 339–​76. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. First published 1919. Friedland, Roger and Deidre Boden, eds. NowHere:  Space, Time and Modernity. London: University of California Press, 1994. Frost, Thomas. The Old Showmen and the London Fairs. London:  Tinsley Brothers, 1875. Gauthier, Philippe and Timothy Barnard. “The Movie Theatre as an Institutional Space and Framework of Signification: Hale’s Tours and Film Historiography.” Film History: An International Journal 21, no. 4 (2009): 326–​335.

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Bibliography Giles, Judy. Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900–​ 50. London: Macmillan, 1995. Gledhill, Christine. Reframing British Cinema, 1918–​1928: Between Restraint and Passion. London: British Film Institute, 2003. Glucksmann, Miriam. Women Assemble: Women Workers and the New Industries in Interwar Britain. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1990. ———. Cottons and Casuals: The Gendered Organisation of Labour in Time and Space. Durham: SociologyPress, 2000. Gordon, Eleanor and Gwyneth Nair. Public Lives: Women, Family and Society in Britain. London: Yale University Press, 2003. Gorky, Maxim. “The Lumière Cinematograph.” In The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Documents 1896–​ 1939, edited by Richard Taylor and Ian Christie. London: Routledge, 1988. Graves, Pamela M. Labour Women: Women in British Working-​Class Politics 1918–​ 1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Gray, Richard. One Hundred Years of Cinema Architecture. London:  Lund Humphries Publishers, 1996. Grieveson, Lee and Peter Kramer, eds. The Silent Cinema Reader. London: Routledge, 2004. Grieveson, Lee and Colin McCabe, eds. Film and the End of Empire. London: British Film Institute, 2011. Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-​Garde.” In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, edited by Thomas Elsaesser, 56–​62. London: British Film Institute, 1990. ———. “Non-​Continuity, Continuity, Discontinuity: A Theory of Genres in Early Films.” In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, edited by Thomas Elsaesser, 86–​94. London: British Film Institute, 1990. ———. “ ‘Primitive’ Cinema: A Frame-​Up? Or, The Trick’s On Us.” In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, edited by Thomas Elsaesser, 95–​103. London: British Film Institute, 1990. ———. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment:  Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator.”  In Early Cinema:  Space, Frame, Narrative, edited by Thomas Elsaesser, 114–​133. London: British Film Institute, 1990. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1989. First published 1962. Hall, Catherine. “Introduction: Thinking the Postcolonial, Thinking the Empire.” In Cultures of Empire: A Reader, edited by Catherine Hall, 1–​33. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000. Hall, Stuart and Ben Gieben. Formations of Modernity:  Understanding Modern Societies. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1993.

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Bibliography Hammilton, Ellis. British Railway History: An Outline from the Accession of William IV to the Nationalisation of the Railways, 1877–​1947. London:  George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1959. Hammond, Michael. The Big Picture Show: British Cinema Culture in the Great War, 1914–​1918. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2006. Hansen, Miriam. “Early Cinema –​Whose Public Sphere?” In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, edited by Thomas Elsaesser, 228–​246. London: British Film Institute, 1990. Hanson, Stuart. From Silent Screen to Multiscreen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain since 1896. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Harris, Jose. Private Lives, Public Spirit:  Britain 1870–​1914. London:  Penguin Books, 1993. Harvey, David. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. London: Profile Books, 2010. Haste, Cate. Keep the Home Fires Burning:  Propaganda in the First World War. London: Penguin Books, 1977. Hayes, Christian. “Phantom Carriages: Reconstructing Hale’s Tours and the Virtual Travel Experience.” Early Popular Visual Culture 7, no. 2 (2009): 185–​198. Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire. London: Penguin Books, 1968. ———. Behind the Times: The Decline and Fall of the Twentieth Century Avant-​ Gardes. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998. Huneault, Kristina. Difficult Subjects: Working Women and Visual Culture, Britain 1880–​1914. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2002. Huntley, John. Railways in the Cinema. London: Ian Allen, 1969. Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious:  Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act. London: Routledge, 1981. ———. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. London: BFI Publishing, 1992. Janes Yeo, Eileen, ed. Radical Femininity: Women’s Self-​Representation in the Public Sphere. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Jones, Margaret and Rodney Lowe. Beveridge to Blair: The First Fifty Years of the Welfare State, 1948–​98. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Kane, Josephine. The Architecture of Pleasure: British Amusement Parks 1900–​1939. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013. Kardish, Laurence, ed. Junction and Journey: Trains in Film. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1991. Kenez, Peter. Cinema and Soviet Society: From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin. London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2001. Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–​1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.

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Bibliography Kirby, Lynne. Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema. Exeter: The University of Exeter Press, 1997. Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-​ Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986. Kuhn, Annette. Women’s Pictures: Feminisms and Cinema. London and New York, NY: Verso, 1982. ———. An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory. London: I.B.Tauris, 2002. Lant, Antonia. Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Leach, John. British Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Lebeau, Vicky. Childhood and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life Volume 1. Translated by John Moore. London: Verso, 1991. First published 1947. ———. Critique of Everyday Life Volume 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday. Translated by John Moore. London: Verso, 2008. First published 1961. ———. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-​Smith. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1974. ———. Critique of Everyday Life 3: From Modernity to Modernism (Towards a Metaphilosophy of Daily Life). Translated by John Moore. London: Verso, 2008. First published 1981. ———. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. London: Continuum, 2004. First published in 1992. Lesnik-​Oberstein, Karín. “Introduction: Voice, Agency and the Child.” In Children in Culture, Revisited Further Approaches to Childhood. Edited by Karín Lesnik-​ Oberstein, 1–​17. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Loiperdinger, Martin. “Lumière’s Arrival of the Train: Cinema’s Founding Myth.” The Moving Image 4, no. 1 (2004): 89–​118. Lury, Karen. The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairytales. London: I.B.Tauris, 2010. Marquand, David. Britain Since 1918:  The Strange Career of British Democracy. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2008. Mayne, Judith. Cinema and Spectatorship. London: Routledge, 1993. McKernan, Luke, ed. Yesterday’s News:  The British Cinema Newsreel Reader. London: British Universities Film and Video Council, 2002. Miller, Daniel. The Comfort of Things. London: Polity Press, 2009. Millward, Liz. Women in British Imperial Airspace, 1922–​1937. London:  McGill University Press, 2008. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. London: Duke University Press, 2011.

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Bibliography Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no.3 (1975): 6–​18. ———. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion, 2006. Musser, Charles. “The Travel Genre in 1903–​1904:  Moving Towards Fictional Narrative.” In Early Cinema:  Space, Frame, Narrative, edited by Thomas Elsaesser, 123–​132. London: British Film Institute, 1990. ———. Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991. Nead, Lynda. Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-​Century London. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Noakes, Lucy. Women in the British Army:  War and the Gentle Sex, 1907–​1948. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2006. Nord, Deborah. Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation and the City. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1995. Perrot, Michelle, ed. A History of Private Life IV: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Phillips, Deborah. Fairground Attractions:  A  Genealogy of the Pleasure Ground. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Pimlott, Mark. Without and Within:  Essays on Territory and the Interior. Rotterdam: Episode Publishers, 2007. Popple, Simon, and Joe Kember. Marketing Modernity:  Victorian Popular Shows and Early Cinema. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2009. Prokhovnik, Raia. “Public and Private Citizenship:  From Gender Invisibility to Feminist Inclusiveness.” Feminist Review, no. 60 (1998): 84–​104. Rappaport, Erika. Shopping for Pleasure. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2000. Reeves, Nicholas. The Power of Film Propaganda:  Myth or Reality? London: Cassell, 1999. Rendell, Jane. The Pursuit of Pleasure: Gender, Space and Architecture in Regency London. London: Athlone Press, 2002. Rendell, Jane, Barbara Penner and Iain Borden, eds. Gender, Space, Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction. London, Routledge, 2000. Rice, Charles. The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity. London: Routledge, 2007. Richards, Jeffrey. The Age of the Dream Palace:  Cinema and Society in Britain 1930–​1939. London and New York: Routledge, 1984. ———. Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Richardson, Dorothy M.  “Films for Children.” In Close Up, 1927–​1933:  Cinema and Modernism. Edited by James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus, 283–​286. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

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Bibliography Richter, Amy. Home on the Rails:  Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity. London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Rieger, Bernhard. Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany 1890–​1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Robb, George. British Culture and the First World War. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Robbins, Michael. The Railway Age. Manchester: Mandolin, 1965. Rosen, Philip. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey:  The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1977. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. London:  Penguin Books, 2003. First published 1974. ———. Flesh and Stone: The Body and The City in Western Civilisation. London: Penguin Books, 2002. Sinclair, M Thea, ed. Gender, Work and Tourism. London: Routledge, 1997. Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001. Sparke, Penny. The Modern Interior. London: Reaktion, 2008. Stamp, Shelley. Movie-​Struck Girls:  Women and Motion Picture Culture After the 1910s. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Steedman, Carolyn. Strange Dislocations:  Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–​1930. London: Virago Press, 1995. ———. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, The Gigantic, The Souvenir, The Collection. London: Duke University Press, 1984. Street, Sarah. British National Cinema. London, New York: Routledge, 1997. Summerfield, Penny. Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Taylor, Philip M. British Democracy in the Twentieth Century: Selling Propaganda. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Thacker, Andrew. Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Toulmin, Vanessa. “Telling the Tale:  The Story of the Fairground Bioscope Shows and the Showmen Who Operated Them.” Film History 6, no. 2 (1994): 219–​237. Vatulescu, Cristina. Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and The Secret Police in Soviet Times. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Vidler, Anthony. Histories of the Immediate Present:  Inventing Architectural Modernism. London: MIT Press, 2008.

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Bibliography ———. ed. Architecture between Spectacle and Use. London: Yale University Press, 2008. Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-​ Victorian London. London: Virago Press, 1992. Walleans, Anne. Designing Liners:  A  History of Interior Design Afloat. London: Routledge, 2006. Walton, John K, ed. Histories of Tourism:  Representation, Identity, Conflict. Clevedon, Canada: Channel View Publications, 2005. Ward, Janet. Weimar Surfaces:  Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany. London: University of California Press, 2001. Weintraub, Jeff. “The Theory and Politics of the Public/​Private Distinction.” In Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy, edited by Jeff Weintraub and Krishnan Kumar, 1–​42. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Wolfreys, Julian. Victorian Hauntings:  Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny, and Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Wolmar, Christian. Fire and Steam:  A  New History of the Railways in Britain. London: Atlantic Books, 2007. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Penguin, 2000. First published 1928.

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Index 39 Steps, The 138–​140, 143, 145, 202 actualités 2, 57–​58, 61 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The 182 Adventures of Robin Hood, The 176 aeroplanes 18, 84, 163, 195, 197, 200, 223, 231–​232, 233 agit-​train 188, 193–​194, 219 Alice in Wonderland (film) 24, 174–​176 amateur film exhibition 152, 159, 178–​181, 185 American Civil War 82 art nouveau 31 Ashes of Vengeance 196 Auden, W H 19 autogyro (helicopter) 217 automobiles and cars 48, 91, 93, 195, 200, 231–​232 Bernstein Report 211 Beveridge Report 219 Big Four 195, 201 billets (evacuation scheme) 150, 156, 160, 165, 167–​178, 183 bioscopes 25, 29–​30, 58–​59, 62, 66 Black Oxen 196 Blackmail 136–​137 blackout 155–​156, 184 Blackpool amusement park 57 Blitz 162 Blue Riband 202 Board of Education 157, 172

Board of Trade 124 Brechot-​Deprez-​Ameline system 79 Brief Encounter 189, 220–​223 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 156, 159, 194, 233 British Empire Exhibition 194–​195 British Expeditionary Force (BEF) 74–​75, 80, 86–​87, 89–​90, 105 British Film Institute (BFI) 185, 233 British Rail 223–​224, 236–​237 British Topical Committee for War Films 86 British Tourist and Holidays Board 219 buses 41, 172, 232–​233, 235, 237 Butterfly or Serpentine Dance 59 caregiving 23, 70–​72, 78, 87, 90, 92–​95, 102–​106 Carroll, Lewis 233 Alice Through the Looking Glass 233 Carroll, Madeleine 140 casualty clearing station (CCS) 79–​80, 87, 93 censorship 70, 86, 89, 101, 103, 159, 213 Channel Tunnel 105 Chaplin, Charlie 88, 176, 179–​180 Charters and Caldicott 236 Chicago Pageant of Progress 193 Children of Men 237 children’s cinema clubs 183 Chronophone 40, 59–​60 cinema train flyer 208, 213–​214

295

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Index cinema train programme 213–​218 cinema trucks and vans 181, 192–​193, 202 Cinematograph Act 1909 28, 125, 128, 192 Cinematograph Train, The 47–​48, 55 City Lights 180 Cock o’ the North 202 Conan Doyle, Arthur 32 Coney Island 57 Confirm or Deny 169 conscription 71, 102 Conservative Party 213 Countryman and the Cinematograph, The 43–​44, 47, 61, 63 Crimean War 73 Cubism 14 Cunard White Star 202 Department for Information 90 Dickens, Charles 31, 34–​35, 124, 229 Christmas Carol, A 31 Dombey and Son 229 Signalman, The 34–​35, 42, 45 Dig for Victory campaign 157 digital media 226–​227 dining coach 99, 144, 191, 206, 210–​211, 223 Disney 159, 176 Dumbo 171 Durbin, Deanna 171 Ealing Studios 236–​237 Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre 57 Edison, Thomas 190 Education Reform Act 1880 153 electric light 7, 18, 50, 59, 79, 118, 123, 151–​152, 196, 201 electricity 9, 59, 82, 151, 157, 196, 198, 211

Eliot, T S 85 ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The’ 85 Emett, Rowland 232–​233 Empire Marketing Board 198 Ensign Photography 133 Fahrenheit 451 237 fairground rides 55–​58, 123 fairgrounds 22, 28–​30, 44, 55–​66, 123 Festival of Britain 231–​234, 236, 238 Firth of Forth Bridge 139, 202 flâneur 133, 157, 186 Flying Scotsman (locomotive/​service) 16, 139, 181, 195–​196 Flying Scotsman, The (film) 16, 109–​112 Freud, Sigmund 33 Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) 70, 74, 77–​78, 81, 95, 103 Geneva Convention 73 George V and Queen Mary 204 George VI and Elizabeth 215, 238 Ghost Train, The 11–​12 Great Depression 201 green trains (ambulance) 77, 79 Greene, Graham 161 Stamboul Train 161 Grierson, John 199 Hale’s Tours 191–​192, 222 Harry Potter (films) 237 hauntings 35–​38, 53–​54 Henry V 171 Hitchcock, Alfred 138, 140, 143 Hitler, Adolf 216 HMV 201 Hogwarts Express 237 home front 23, 69, 72, 86–​90, 101–​104, 107, 111, 117

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Index Modern Times 180 modernity France 6, 73, 125, 195, 202 Germany 4–​5, 10, 73, 152, 195, 197, 202 Russia 73, 188, 193–​194, 219 USA 4–​6, 8, 57, 73, 169, 191, 195, 202, 233 Molesworth, Mary Louisa 33 Morris, William 31 music hall 59, 130, 138 musical accompaniment 180, 198

House of Commons 136 Houston, Penelope 236 Howdy Chicago 193 Imperial Agricultural Research Conference 198–​199 in-​flight movies 193 Jonah Man, The 41–​42 Kate Plus Ten 135, 142–​143, 145 khaki trains (ambulance) 77–​78, 80 kinetoscope 32 Kiss in the Tunnel, A 16 L’Arrivée d’un Train à la Ciotat 28, 42 Labour Party 173, 194 Lady Vanishes, The 16, 111, 143–​146, 220, 236 League of Nations 132, 137 Letter from an Unknown Woman 189, 220, 222–​223 Life of an American Fireman 127, 190 liners and ships 8, 79, 91, 94, 200–​202, 215–​216, 232 locals (films) 61, 63 Logie Baird, John 200 London County Council, LCC 172–​174 Lumières 28, 125 Lux soap 133 magic and magicians 33–​34, 36, 39, 83, 145, 185, 237 magic lantern shows 39, 180, 190 Married Love 127–​128 McDowall, Roddy 169 Midnight Mail 118 Ministry of Information (MoI) 86, 90, 181 Ministry of Labour 148

National Archives 214 National Council of Social Service 172 National Union of Railwaymen 120 Nesbit, Edith 50 neurasthenia 124, 162; see also shell shock Newsreel companies British Movietone News 127, 164, 212–​213 British Pathé 25, 117, 121, 127, 165, 188–​190, 203–​206, 210–​211, 213, 218–​220, 223–​224 Gaumont-​British 85, 87–​88, 172, 183, 213, 202 Gaumont Pathé 69, 106, 125 Pathé Frères 84, 198 Topical Films 86 newsreel company owners 211–​212 newsreel theatres 202, 204 nickelodeons 58 Night Mail 19 Night Train to Munich 236 Nightingale, Florence 95 Normandie 201 Number Seventeen 135, 137–​138, 143 nurses and nursing 23, 70–​72, 75, 77–​81, 90–​99, 103, 106, 111, 130

297

298

Index Odeon 172–​173, 177, 183, 205 Ondra, Anny 137 Operation Pied Piper 149 Our Gang 179 Overland Express 171 panoramas 56, 222 Paul, R W 28, 41, 45, 123 Pepper, John Henry 35–​36, 41 Pepper’s Ghost 35–​36 phantom ride 21, 28, 30, 37, 39, 48–​57, 59, 191–​192 Phipps, Emily 119, 137 photography 1, 10, 18, 31, 40, 72, 82, 84, 125, 133, 199 Pleasure Gardens, Battersea 232 Post Office 19, 117, 121, 201 praxinoscope 32 Princess Margaret 223 psychoanalysis 6, 14 Quadrophenia 237 Queen Mary 202 radio 7, 19, 150, 156, 174, 193–​194, 200–​202 Railway Clerks’ Association 120 railway companies Great Central 75 Great Northern 61 Great Western (GWR) 91, 195, 199, 201, 223 London, Brighton and South Coast 62 London Midland and Scotland (LMS) 195, 198–​199, 201, 210–​211, 223 London and North Eastern (LNER) 16, 77, 105, 109, 189, 194–​214, 218–​220, 223–​227

London and North Western 75, 77, 115 London and South Western 75, 130, 218 Southern (SR) 136, 195, 199, 201, 218–​219 railway pageants 112, 122 railway queens 112, 122, 127 railway services cocktail bars 201, 218 furniture removals 201 hair salons 201, 203, 218 railway spine 7, 124, 162 Railways (Prevention of Accidents) Bill 1900 124 Ramsey Macdonald, James 200–​201 rationing 80–​81, 231 Ravilious, Eric 161 Red Cross 70–​71, 77, 96, 106 Red Shoes, The 1–​2 Redfern, Jasper 59, 62 Representation of the People Act 1832 11 Representation of the People Act 1918 111, 118 Richardson, Dorothy 159, 174, 183, 185 Roentgen’s rays 31–​32 Royal Air Force (RAF) 195 Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) 23, 70, 77, 91–​93, 96, 105 Royal Mail 202 Sabotage 24 Salvation Army 180, 190, 209 Seven Sinners 140–​143 Sex Disqualification Removal Act 1919 111, 119, 147 shell shock 103; see also neurasthenia Shooting Stars 111 Shops Act 1911 110 Silent Passenger, The 202

298

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Index Thief of Bagdad, The 174 Thomas Cook 17 ticket prices 24, 220 Titfield Thunderbolt, The 231, 233–​237 tourism 9, 35, 54, 61, 161, 165, 195, 197, 215, 218, 219, 221 Trade Boards Act 1909 110 Transport Act 1947 219 Trevithick, Richard 234 Turner, J M 197

sleeper train 130, 141 smart phones 227 Smashing the Spy Ring 171 Somme, Battle of the 81–​82 sound film 40, 136, 179, 199, 207 South Bank 231–​233 spheres, public and private 13–​15, 113–​114 spiritualism 32 St Louis World Fair 191 St Paul’s Cathedral 233 Stevenson, Robert Louis 229 suffrage 11, 106, 109–​110, 116, 118, 146, 188 Suffragette’s Dream, A 116 suffragettes 116 surrealism 14 surveillance 183–​184

Vertov, Dziga 193

tablet (electronic) 227 technicolor 176, 180–​182, 237 telegraphs and telegrams 7, 31–​32, 49, 51, 53–​55, 62, 82, 117, 126–​127, 141, 201, 220 telepathy 31 television 200, 202, 226, 231, 233, 236–​237

Wayne, Naunton 236 Wells, H G 147 Wembley Stadium 194–​195 western front 23, 72, 86, 88, 96 When the Devil Drives 22, 54–​55, 57 Williams, Randall 59, 62 Women’s Institute 172 Women’s Voluntary Service 172 Woolf, Virginia 117 Wrecker, The 16, 24, 111, 136, 143, 146, 199 zoetrope 32

299

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