Night Mail 9781838713201, 9781844572298

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F OR J OAN AUDREY B OSWELL THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in 2007 by the British Film Institute Reprinted by Bloomsbury in 2018 (twice) on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of filmmakers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. Copyright © Scott Anthony, 2007 The author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. 6 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Ashley Western Series text design: ketchup/SE14 Images on pp. 15, 16, 19, 20 & 38 reproduced by kind permission of The British Postal Museum and Archive. ‘Night Mail’ by W. H. Auden (© The Estate of W. H. Auden) reproduced by kind permission of the Royal Mail and Faber & Faber Ltd; ‘Night Mail’ by Blake Morrison (© Blake Morrison) reproduced by kind permission of the Royal Mail. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: PB: 978-1-8445-7229-8 Series: BFI Film Classics Typeset by D R Bungay Associates, Burghfield, Berks Printed and bound in Great Britain To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Acknowledgments This monograph could not have been written without the support of the British Film Institute. Particular thanks go to publishers Rebecca Barden and Sarah Watt, Mark Duguid and Michael Brooke for their Screenonline commissions, Sean Delaney, Janet Moat and the rest of the BFI’s outstanding libraries and collection staff, and to Bryony Dixon, Christophe Dupin, Brian Robinson, Richard Paterson, Patrick Russell and Phil Wickham for their interest and enthusiasm. The irreplaceable Tom Cabot worked tirelessly and was embarrassingly tolerant of my tinkering. I would also like to thank Stuart Tyson, Barry Attoe and the rest of the Postal Museum and Archive staff for their invaluable guidance. Els Boonan at the BBC Archive, Helen Beardsley at the Grierson Archive at the University of Stirling, Julie McCaffery at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London, Dr Nicholas Clark at the BrittenPears Library, Suffolk and the staff of the Bodleian, Oxford were also especially helpful. Many thanks also to Dr Charles Wiffen for sending me his ‘From Realism to Utopia: Britain Expressed in the Soundtracks of the GPO Films’ paper and to Dr Adrian Gregory, Jose Arroyo, Professor Charlotte Brunsdon, John Brand, Mark Fraser and Michael Hulse for allowing me the benefit of their considerable wisdom. I owe a further debt of gratitude to Miranda Pemberton-Pigott, Mark and Virginia Dessain and John Pemberton-Pigott for allowing me access to the private papers of Sir Stephen Tallents and for giving me an insight into his character. In addition, Dr Martin Francis and Wolfson College, Oxford have provided me with patient and generous backing. Finally, multiple thanks and near eternal gratitude to Eddie Dyja, Steven Eeley and Luke Heeley who expertly read and patiently critiqued this manuscript.

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1 A Man Called Tallents

Sir Stephen Tallents’ interest touched life at many points – variously and sometimes oddly – all the way to thistledown pillow and ratskin prayer books … documentary cinema is his monument. John Grierson1 A very nice gentle creature who was Empire Marketing Board and started Grierson’s film unit. Graham Greene2

Night Mail’s genius has been variously ascribed to John Grierson’s documentary ethos, the avant-garde nous of GPO film-maker Alberto Cavalcanti, the popular stirrings of W. H. Auden’s poetry and the beginnings of Benjamin Britten’s brilliant composing career. As exceptional as those men’s abilities were, this seems sloppy and slightly unjust. Formally, Night Mail’s greatness rests on its skilful blending of word, sound and image. Critical appreciation has often reduced it to the extraordinary number of interwar era ‘names’ that can be shoehorned into an account of the film’s production. This is deeply unfair on the two men credited with producing the film, Basil Wright and (the even more frequently forgotten) Harry Watt. It also shamefully neglects the man primarily responsible for creating a public-sector film unit, staffing it with such remarkable people and tenaciously supporting its efforts, the aptly named Sir Stephen Tallents. Tallents, an unusually inventive civil servant, had established the principle of a government film unit while working at the Empire Marketing Board (EMB). The EMB (1926–33) was a pioneering governmental venture in peacetime propaganda, a loose, Sir Stephen Tallents

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experimental organisation whose uneven output reflected Tallents’s personal idiosyncrasies. As an EMB colleague described him: Outwardly he was a shy man whose aloofness and reserve of manner discouraged intimacy and made many people find him cold and awe inspiring … this outward reticence hid, however, a highly romantic side to his complex nature, which had found expression in writing over-stylized prose articles for the back page of The Manchester Guardian.3

On the one hand, Tallents was the writer of Chekhovian short-story collections who had attracted News of the World infamy by attempting to elope with a wealthy heiress. On the other hand, Tallents was a senior civil servant whose distinguished career in public service had been defined by an unorthodox scientism. Under Tallents’s direction the EMB sought to encourage new scientific, commercial and cultural relationships between Britain and an increasingly independent-minded Empire. It sought to sidestep tricky political issues by funding collaborations and exchange programmes, by subsidising publications and donating to research projects. It supported the growing of pineapples in Zanzibar, the cultivation of grapes in Palestine and the planting of rice fields in Harwich and Southend. During its seven years of existence the Board attempted to convince and cajole producers, distributors and consumers to change their behaviour for the benefit of all the Empire’s peoples. Indeed, it is not too fanciful to suggest that the work of modern non-governmental organisations (NGOs} and ‘fair trade’ campaigners have some roots in the scientific and economic development schemes sponsored by the EMB. Hence, at one level, the EMB published studies such as The Behaviour and Diseases of the Banana in Storage and Transport, while at the other it organised massive shopping exhibitions whose scope ranged from the distribution of aloo gobi recipes to mass-participation yoga classes. The EMB was brought to popular notice by an array of conspicuously successful cultural interventions. Tallents hired artists,

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writers and eventually film-makers to ‘bring the Empire alive’ by celebrating the ‘forms of life not often discussed in speeches’. Tallents believed that the extension of the franchise and the end of World War I had opened up a new era of democratic internationalism in which the Commonwealth should play a key part. He spoke of: Henry the Navigator and the School of Navigation by which he opened up the New World, and he would point to film, radio, poster and exhibition as the sextant and compass which would manoeuvre citizenship over the new distances.4

Tallents’s enthusiasm for film was unusual for a man of his position in the civil service. Although, by the mid-1920s, the cultural and economic challenge posed by American domination of the British film market was creating widespread political unease, this unease had crystallised in the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927, a piece of protectionist legislation which required cinemas to show a minimum quota of British films. Tallents considered this response inadequate, preferring instead to promote the production of distinctively British titles rather than limit the import of foreign films. The recruitment of John Grierson and the terrible impact of the Wall Street Crash served to harden Tallents’s conviction. John Grierson was to become one of the defining personalities of British film. He both informed, and was a product of, a wider strand of interwar middle-class thought which attempted to fuse the emerging media technologies with an educational mission. His conception of documentary film bears obvious comparison with, for example, John Reith’s direction of ‘public-service’ broadcasting at the BBC. However, the aims and integrity of the documentary school Grierson created, and the quality and reach of the films this school produced, remain fiercely contested. It can be argued that Grierson played a key role in embedding a certain kind of realist aesthetic – a mode of social enquiry that tends to romanticise the everyday, ordinary or working class – into the fabric of British film culture. It

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could just as easily be said that his vision was so limited and particular that his only positive legacy is the striking public safety films that hit our screens every year around Christmas time.5 For the purposes of this monograph, we need only explain that this strange mixture of sombre schoolmaster and egocentric showman was crucial to organising and then orientating, Night Mail. Grierson joined the EMB after a spell at Chicago’s famed school of social sciences. While in the US, Grierson had become convinced that the future of participative democracy depended on the development of new methods of civic education that were better able to capture the imagination and critical attention of the mass populace. Grierson believed film would be crucial to this development, coining the term ‘documentary’ to define a new kind of realistic feature dedicated to explaining, and interrogating, contemporary conditions.6 Ensconced in film research under Tallents’s wing at the EMB, Grierson waited for an opportunity to turn democratic theory into effective film-making practice. He soon got the opportunity he craved. The EMB’s first film, One Family (1930), was a delirious high-budget romp that centred on a little boy’s quest to gather the ingredients necessary to bake an Empire Christmas pudding. It was also an unmitigated disaster. Despite the popularity of the actual puddings (and the giant sevenfoot pudding the EMB baked to promote it), One Family sunk with the public and bombed with the critics.7 The door was at last ajar for Grierson’s serious, and more sensibly budgeted, brand of cinema to take centre stage at the EMB. To his eternal credit, Grierson managed to produce two John Grierson

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documentaries, the self-directed Drifters (1929), and Robert Flaherty’s Industrial Britain (1933), of lasting interest and imaginative power. The contentious portrayal of ‘dignified labour’ in these slump-era pictures created a critical sensation that appeared to bear out Grierson’s convictions. The impact of these two films convinced Tallents of the Unit’s potential. He almost apologetically explained: I write in this airy fashion, believing you will not confuse, any more than I confuse in my own mind, limited actual achievements with actual possibilities. We ourselves are conscious of many more defects in the specimen films than anyone looking at them for the first time is likely to notice. But I believe that there is a nucleus of remarkable promise in this EMB Unit, and this is recognised outside the EMB.8

Tallents’s pleading not only saved the Film Unit when the EMB was disbanded in 1933, but saw it transferred with him to the General Post Office (GPO). Tallents had long claimed that the documentary unit had been conceived along similar lines to Michel St Denis’s multitasking theatre group Compagnie de Quinze. The GPO’s financial backing enabled him to realise this vision and allowed Grierson to begin developing a documentary ‘school’. In the first instance Alberto Cavalcanti was recruited from the commercial world, brought in to ‘leaven with a more human touch the slightly inhuman austerity, which had tended to mar the unit’s work in the past’. The fêted director of Rien que les heures (1926) was soon followed to the GPO Film Unit’s new Blackheath studio by an incredible flock of artists, poets, painters and personalities. As Night Mail director Harry Watt remembered: We had done some films for the Post Office, and they were pretty uninspiring … What we rank-and-filers did not realise was that we were being taken over to the PO by Sir Stephen Tallents, that most understanding of men, and that we would find, amongst the faceless little squares we imagined were hidden away in the bowels of the administration, some of the most easy going and sympathetic persons an experimental unit could wish for.9

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The GPO Film Unit’s Blackheath studio

Experimental was an apt description of the Film Unit. As well as taking aesthetic risks, the GPO Film Unit operated completely outside of the norms of the commercial mainstream. Its films were more likely to be distributed through film clubs, trade exhibitions and in schools, than seen in cinemas. For more than a decade, at least, the documentary film circuit operated at the margins of the film business. Its films rarely reached the spectacular new cinemas of the age; instead they found their way to audiences through the GPO’s mass media events and consumer exhibitions.10 Additionally, the EMB/GPO film directors were self-taught and, as anyone who has sat through an afternoon of their early efforts will attest, they struggled to master a steep learning curve. The unusually generous support afforded to Tallents’s amateur organisation belied the fact that he had been appointed to the GPO board in 1933 as part of a desperate lastditch effort to stave off privatisation.

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In the first instance, Tallents’s work at the GPO involved little more than devising ingenious ways to increase revenue by selling more telephones. New customer-focused services – such as directory enquiries, the speaking clock, ‘999’ and telephone chess – were to be unveiled with exquisite showmanship. For example, as part of 1934’s ‘Telephone Week’ the cable ship HTMS Monarch was sailed down the Thames and opened up to an enthusiastic public. Speakers were erected in Trafalgar Square to blare out a concert performed by Jack Hylton’s jazz band as it was flown over London in an Imperial Airways plane. The extraordinary team of modernist musicians collected at the GPO Film Unit produced an avant-garde selection of ‘novel GPO sounds’ for broadcast by the BBC. Most relevantly, the GPO Film Unit took advantage of its new studio’s facilities to produce its first full-scale sound venture, Pett and Pott (1934). Cavalcanti’s enjoyably whimsical short

The daft officialese surrealism of Pett and Pott – commissioned as part of 1934’s ‘Telephone Week’

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(arguably Pett and Pott is little more than an extended advert) contrasted the sensible phone-owning Petts, with the snobbish servant-keeping Potts, in what was quite possibly the world’s first slice of mass-appeal surrealism.11 The second strand of the GPO’s media blitz was directed towards restoring the Post Office’s reputation. Tallents commissioned Macdonald Gill to design a new Post Office logo and this new ‘brand’ was used as the basis for a wide-ranging programme of prestige publicity. This ‘publicity’ included everything from supplying schools with toy telephone sets, to the upgrading of Post Office pens. It meant hiring artists to design the air mail label and asking architects to contribute ideas for optimising space in new post offices. So far-reaching were Tallents’s ambitions that he even attempted to talk popular film director Victor Saville (the man behind mostly forgotten cheer such as Sunshine Susie [1931] and Evergreen [1934]) into placing GPO telephones in his hit musicals.12 This was an idea apparently inspired by The Times reporting that the Chinese government was sponsoring comedians to crack antiopium jokes.13 Of course, pouring resources and creative energy into an experimental propaganda programme that would only yield benefits in the long term was a risky and controversial strategy as the net effect was to substantially increase costs while providing services of less obvious material benefit to the business. Accordingly, Tallents spent much of his tenure at the GPO explaining and defending the rationale of his fiendishly expensive PR campaigns to his political masters. He reasoned: Any big undertaking, which succeeds in creating in the public mind an interest in its work, a conviction that it is actively trying to serve the public, a belief that it is more likely to be right than to be wrong, and a desire on the part of the public to co-operate with it, is saving friction in the working of the machine, discouragement among its staff and waste of time and effort in dealing with groundless or trivial complaints and suspicions.14

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The succès d’estime of the GPO Film Unit’s maverick output quickly became crucial to Tallents’s civil-service standing. Grierson’s documentary school gained art-world kudos from appropriating seemingly unusable avant-garde footage from the Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy and finding work for rare émigré talents such as Lotte Reiniger. The award of the Prix du Gouvernement Belge to Basil Wright’s The Song of Ceylon (1934) at the Brussels Film Festival, along with commendations for BBC: The Voice of Britain (1935), Coal Face (1935) and Len Lye’s abstract curio A Colour Box (1935), secured Tallents’s reputation. In less than ten years his poorly funded amateur film-making outfit had begun to make a significant critical impact. For the first time, commercial advertising firms were looking to the public sector for leadership. Tallents’s status as an ethical entrepreneur culminated in him winning the Publicity Cup of Great Britain in 1935. Tallents brought modernist design to the GPO, resulting in striking exhibition displays like the Glasgow Empire Exhibition pavilion of 1937

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The GPO Film Unit operated completely outside the norms of the commercial film industry

The release of Night Mail in 1936 provided the ultimate popular justification for Tallents’s work. Basil Wright and Harry Watt’s film enshrined the GPO’s new-found corporate sophistication in an appropriately modernist aesthetic. Pre-Tallents, it was common for the GPO to be portrayed as a tatty, seemingly ever more anachronistic, institution: I have no prejudice against nationalisation, but I am bound to say that while the Post Office monopoly gives us obvious advantages in point of economy, no private business could survive if conducted as dully or simply as the Post Office.15

By the time Tallents left the GPO for the BBC, a previously hostile press proclaimed that: ‘The praise of the Post Office is nowadays in everybody’s mouth: its efficiency, its enterprise, its alertness and responsiveness, its courtesy and humanity.’16 In many ways, Tallents’s publicity work at the GPO had merely aped the eye-catching high-end methods of Frank Pick, whom he had worked with at the Empire Marketing Board. Pick was (in the celebrated critic Nikolaus Pevsner’s estimation) ‘the Mæcenas of our time’, an arts-and-crafts enthusiast who used his Chief Executive

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position at the London Underground to sponsor experiments in applied modernism.17 Thus his reign saw the Underground make pioneering contributions in architecture (through the buildings of Charles Holden), graphic design (with Harry Beck’s famous ‘circuit’ tube map) and poster art (Pick brought artists of the calibre of Man Ray and Graham Sutherland into public-spirited service). Pick’s farsighted patronage was motivated, like many establishment reformers of the time, by a belief that social and economic reform would only be successful if it were accompanied by a corresponding degree of spiritual growth. Pick’s impeccable taste and what is now an unfashionable commitment to ‘cultural uplift’, undoubtedly helped Tallents to lay the track for the peculiarly modest, humane and utilitarian character of British modernism that is so crucial to understanding Night Mail.18 However, while Pick provided Tallents with an artistic and intellectual foothold in the fast-expanding media landscape of interwar Britain, Tallents’s work was also deeply informed by his own Liberal political convictions. Night Mail was more than just an exercise in enlightened patronage or gaudy self-publicity. The massmedia experiments Tallents sponsored were directed towards clear artistic and social ends. As a volunteer at Toynbee Hall, a philanthropic project in London’s East End, Tallents had made lasting friendships with politicians and social reformers, such as Clement Attlee and William Beveridge, who would drive the creation of the welfare state. He shared their impatience for political change but, as a career civil servant, realised that if the state were to become a larger provider of social services then it needed to communicate more effectively with the populace at large. Believing that official mindsets had to move away from the ‘older view of government as a negative function, preventing the bad rather than promoting the good’ towards a ‘new and more creative conception of government’, Tallents hammered Frank Pick’s mildly esoteric methods into a philosophy of public relations.19 Public relations had previously meant nothing more than the writing and placing of advertorial.

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Over the next ten years Tallents and his collaborators – such as Jack Beddington at Shell – were to temporarily infuse the nascent discipline with an odd mixture of cultural philanthropy and popular education. Tallents explained: I believe that an efficient system of communications must touch the imagination as well as appeal to the intelligence … the best expression of this belief I know, is a sentence I once chanced upon in a letter from John Stuart Mill, the economist, to Thomas Carlyle, the historian – ‘It is in the artist,’ he wrote, ‘in whose hands alone truth becomes impressive and a living principle of action.’20

This strategy helped the GPO stave off the threat of privatisation and transformed the image of the organisation (in Clement Attlee’s words) ‘to an outstanding example of collective capitalism’.21 By idealising the innovation and efficiency of an expanded public sector, films like Night Mail represented an important ideological development towards the creation of the welfare state. Educated middle-class opinion began to move from fearing the ‘levelling down’ effects of leftwing corporatism to perceiving state intervention as an opportunity for applying expertise. Night Mail is the definitive cinematic incarnation of Tallents’s artistically and politically powerful rebranding of the GPO.

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2 The Making and Meaning of Night Mail Night Mail has often been mocked because its workers are too cheerful, its trains are too punctual and its palpable pride in the workings of the Post Office is simply too credulous to be credible.22 Harsher critics assert that the film is less a documentary than a fantastical imagining of a model railway. In a literal sense these accusations are true, because Night Mail does indeed have its roots in a model railway – a BassettLowke model of the travelling post office, to be precise. Commissioned by Tallents to attract the public to GPO exhibitions, the Bassett-Lowke model ran along 120 feet of track at speeds of up to eight miles per hour.23 The model’s popularity made Night Mail has its roots in the model of the travelling post office made by Fabian and friend of Frank Pick, Wenman Joseph Bassett-Lowke

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Journalists from the GPO’s staff magazine identified aspects of travelling post office work that would appeal to the general public

it an obvious focus of attention when the GPO decided to expand its education programme in October 1935. In the past, Tallents had commissioned top industrial artists such as Edward McKnight Kauffer, as well as writers such as John Buchan, to produce teaching material for schools. From now on the department would be producing more ambitious multimedia educational packs including postcards and pamphlets. Travelling Post Office (as the film was known then) was even to be toured round schools in ‘cinema vans’ – mobile movie houses that could be dispatched to the furthestflung corners of Great Britain.24 Holding court in The Railway Arms at the end of Bennett Park Road, Blackheath, Grierson briefed his film-makers:

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Can we imagine a society without letters? Of course we can’t. But does anyone appreciate the postman? Of course not. We take him for granted like the milkman, the engine driver, coal miner, the lot of them. We take them all for granted, yet we are all dependent on them, just as we are all interdependent one to another. It has nothing to do with class or education. The simple fact is that we are in each other’s debt. We must acknowledge it and pay it with respect and gratitude one to another. This is what we must get over. This is what documentary is all about.25

Night Mail perfectly captures the spirit Grierson described. From the opening sequence to the closing titles his moral purpose is pounded into Night Mail. The workers are portrayed as the nation’s nervous system, their efforts loosely binding together quite unexpected bits of Britain. The film opens with a message being rushed to the ‘postal special’ before it leaves Euston for Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. Over the next twenty-four minutes the film explains and elaborates the everyday obstacles faced by the workers of the travelling post office. We see how the precise co-ordination of passenger and mail trains underpins the smooth running of the postal system. We get a sense of the physical effort required to feed a train’s furnace or change a signal and we watch the frantic collecting, sorting and dropping off of mail. To give this catalogue of sequences Night Mail moves from everyday mundanity to exquisite poetry

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dramatic momentum, the film progresses from a near silent opening to a closing cacophony of poetry and sound. By its conclusion, Night Mail has transmuted the routine chores of the postal service into an emotionally charged, highly aestheticised tribute to their work. ‘None will hear the postman’s knock without a quickening of the heart,’ the film ends, ‘for who can bear to feel himself forgotten?’ Nevertheless, described in its most basic terms the film is potentially as mechanical as the Bassett-Lowke model. Night Mail largely avoids this fate, thanks to the influence of Harry Watt. On the face of it, Harry Watt was not the ideal director. He had just two shorts to his name, no knowledge of the travelling post office and, to begin with, little enthusiasm for learning about it. He dismissed the short scenario that Basil Wright had apparently prepared as ‘a routine PO job’. Similarly, he described his first GPO film, Six-Thirty Collection (1935), as ‘unadulterated boredom’ and famously expressed a preference for ‘Cowboys and Indians’ over Grierson’s ‘creative treatment of actuality’. Watt, according to his assistant, Pat Jackson, therefore simply ignored Wright’s scenario and ‘just went out and shot the film sequence by sequence, by guess and by God, hoping for the best’. He did at least know what he wanted to avoid. Watt recalled: When we joined them (the Post Office) full time, we were bemused to discover that they were the largest employers of labour in the country, with fleets of vans and lorries, trains, ships, aeroplanes and even their own underground railway. So we made a general film which ended up just spouting statistics, and was as dull as ditch water. Then we saw our stupid mistake. The story of the Post Office was one letter, one telegram, one telephone call, one postman’s round, one train or one ship. There was as much drama and humanity involved in these as in any fictional imaginings.26

Re-watching Night Mail, it is the abundance of human details that impress: the wheel-tapper in Crewe, the postmen complaining about the weight of their bags on ‘pools night’, the farmer collecting

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Signalman

Farmer

Wheel tapper

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his paper and turning immediately to the cricket score. Early in the shooting of Night Mail, Watt and his small crew (Pat Jackson, Jonah Jones, Chick Fowle and, quite probably, W. H. Auden) trudged up a railway line in Hertfordshire to take stock shots of signals moving, points changing and engines passing. Wandering without a particular purpose, Watt’s crew became so desperate for material that they even filmed the London, Midlands and Scotland railway official who accompanied them. (‘He carried a red flag, had a whistle permanently between his teeth which he blew with monotonous regularity.’) Their outing was saved by the discovery of a plate-laying gang, a few miles north of Hemel Hempstead: Like prospectors we thought we had struck it rich … We now filmed an off moment in the plate layer’s routine. A shared quart bottle of beer, a few comments from one to another – I noted their remarks for revoicing later – and close shots of these weather beaten faces, a life’s work imprinted on each. This, I could already sense, was the thrill of documentary, putting the people of Britain on the screen, recorded for all time.27

Watt’s vaguely anthropological approach is unsurprising. He had cut his documentary teeth lumping Robert Flaherty’s equipment around the Irish isles of Aran. Flaherty was the spiritual godfather of documentary. He was an explorer turned film-maker who shot to worldwide fame with Nanook of the North (1922). Flaherty’s obsession with chronicling life in harsh environments dragged him from the Eskimos (Nanook) to Europe (Man of Aran, 1934) via the South Seas (Moana, 1926 and Tabu, 1931). However, although Flaherty worked briefly for the EMB (Industrial Britain), he was never entirely convinced by Grierson’s charges (on a legendary night out in Soho he drunkenly accused them of ‘lacking balls’) and they remained firmly in two minds about him.28 Watt considered him dishonest, Flaherty’s film on Aran, for example, depicted locals hunting basking sharks (a practice they had long abandoned) and grossly exaggerated the islanders’ poverty and isolation.

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Watt’s anthropological leanings are also indicative of the wider spirit of the age. Intellectuals were increasingly coming to recognise the lack of knowledge and understanding that existed across Britain’s class divides. Newsreels could not be trusted to provide information about the real attitudes and opinions of either the political élite or the common man and nor could box-office cinema. Equally, the depth of press collusion with the establishment in suppressing important information was soon to be revealed by the abdication crisis, while Gallup’s opinion polls had only just crossed the Atlantic. The urge to address this lack of knowledge was a defining characteristic of the ‘Grierson school’.29 Night Mail laid down an important early marker of the wartime fusion of popular anthropology and documentary cinema to come. Despite its impressive lineage, Night Mail still contains many contradictions and tensions. The GPO Film Unit’s mission to expound the virtues of the Post Office to some extent precluded a more searching consideration of the lives of its workers. Watt had sarcastically complained of Six-Thirty Collection: Once you post a letter there is little that can happen to it, except the process of collecting, sorting and delivering. They have been known to be blown up by the IRA, or covered with a swarm of bees, or even eaten by a plague of snails, but such a scene would hardly fit into a film financed by the Post Office to emphasise its modernity.30

Thus the sequence featuring the gang of plate-layers (they appear shortly after the train leaves Euston) is singularly unconvincing. Their original words may have been noted, but in the final edit they were presumably replaced by dialogue (‘That’ll be the postal’) that reemphasises the thrust of the narration: everybody is working together to ensure the mail is delivered on time. The images hint at a slightly different story. The train passes and the men slowly sip from a bottle of beer and then too swiftly – almost as if the footage has been speeded up – resume work on the line. The plate-layers’ weary gaze

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Recorded for all time: The plate-laying gang of Hemel Hempstead

and their languid lighting of pipes makes the viewer doubtful this was really what they immediately did. Here and elsewhere, the film struggles to prevent its explanation of Post Office practices overwhelming its film-makers’ evident interest in the lives of Night Mail’s workers. There were also more practical reasons for this lack of focus; namely that Basil Wright and Alberto Cavalcanti began editing Watt’s material before he had finished filming. As Watt was a novice director shooting on the hoof, it is unsurprising that Wright and Cavalcanti were unable to read his intentions. This quirk produces some odd effects. The train’s progress through the regional accents of Britain from London via the South East to the North Midlands, the North West and Scotland, for example, is far from linear. Indeed, the jumble of locales and accents verges on the anarchic. It’s unclear whether these jump-cuts in sound are designed to be expressive or are just plain amateurish. The even larger problem for Wright and Cavalcanti was that Watt often did not know what he was doing. Watt’s cameraman recalled some of the director’s disastrous handiwork: I had to show it to Harry (Watt) eventually and his language was not conversational … ‘Cav (Alberto Cavalcanti) warned me about it, even drew it for me. I thought I’d got it into my nut, but I bloody well haven’t.’ He explained

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his mistake by drawing a line between two characters A and B. A and B are talking to each other, perfectly natural that now and then they should occasionally look at each other. One will look ‘camera right’ and the other ‘camera left’. Joined together the looks will cross and give the impression that they are looking at each other. Sounds simple enough but the plate layers were all looking right and seemed to be looking away from each other …31

For the most part, Night Mail evidences Harry Watt’s journalistic talent, his nose for ‘a vignette, a little happening’. The scripted exchanges during the staff changeover at Crewe, for instance, cannot be justly compared to Flaherty’s falsehoods. As they are leaving the train an English sorter notes ‘There’s no water for the Jock’s tea’ – and then as the two crews pass each other, another blurts out, ‘I hope you enjoy your tea’, and a Scotsman retorts: ‘I know what that means. No water.’ Later on, the sorters’ supervisor is shown swigging from a cup of milk.

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At worst, Watt’s writing is inoffensively bland. In truth, the brittle cheekiness that characterises much of Night Mail’s dialogue probably owes much to Watt’s secondment to the European office of March of Time. March of Time was a short-lived but highly influential newsreel version (‘its impact was enormous, with machine gun commentary, poured out in Timese by a doomwatch voice’) of Time magazine. On March of Time, as Watt had it, ‘No-one was just a crooked lawyer. He was a pipe smoking, bandy legged, father of ten, ambulance chaser, John Smith, aged 43.’ It may not have done anything for his dialogue, but Watt’s experience of working on newsreels undoubtedly improved his ability to coax camera-pleasing performances from everyday folk. Watt was surprisingly modest about this: People have often asked me how I found my actors in my dramatised documentaries. I’m afraid it is a sad comment on the acting profession: you look for the extroverts, the bullshit merchants, the boring life-and-soul-ofthe-party boys. They are natural hams, but if you then wheedle and bully them down to some sort of naturalness, they’re actors.32

This was not a gift shared by many of his GPO colleagues. As has often been noted, the GPO Film Unit was mostly staffed by overearnest upper-middle-class Cambridge graduates. The documentary film-makers’ privileged social background may have informed the movement’s sense of social responsibility, but it quite probably inhibited their relationship, to coin a Griersonism, with the living thing. Watt served his ‘education’ as a management trainee at British Home Stores and Night Mail (just like his subsequent successes North Sea [1938] and Target for Tonight [1941]) contains plenty of telling detail. There is a lovely wry sequence where we see a Post Office supervisor wandering down through a carriage checking the work of the sorters. One of the sorters is talking to his neighbour and the supervisor brusquely steps in:

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Supervisor: What’s the trouble? Sorter: Badly addressed. Supervisor: Dolgellau … (he thinks) … Wales. Sorter: You don’t get many of those these days. Supervisor: Well, then (with slightly sarcastic emphasis) it makes a nice change for you. The sorter turns to stare at the supervisor already making his way down the carriage. On paper the dialogue expresses sentiments that are considerably less nuanced than those of the GPO’s publicity committee: the GPO’s staff are knowledgeable and their professionalism and bond with the public (‘You don’t get many of those these days’) is improving. On screen though, the exchange between manager and subordinate is entirely convincing, containing a perfect mixture of deference and needle. In the mouths of Night Mail’s ‘real-life’ actors, even the worst of Watt’s journalistic desperate-to-keep-your-attention dialogue, grows in gravitas. Crucially, Night Mail draws authenticity and narrative strength from recording the well-practised glances, glares and behavioural tics of the travelling post office’s staff. Watt’s occasionally weak dialogue cannot undermine this key quality. To over-emphasise how much of Night Mail is either scripted or reconstructed is to therefore miss the point. The technological limitations of the period prevented Night Mail from being shot in any other way. The crew’s ‘portable’ cameras worked by clockwork and

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were housed in bulky rectangular aluminium casing that made them both heavy and difficult to hold. The few sequences in Night Mail not shot on a tripod are easy to spot on account of their almost farcical unsteadiness. Equally, the ‘portable’ lights were not powerful enough to balance in-train photography with the natural light outside. Reportage-style shooting was made doubly impossible because the GPO’s camera had no lens turret, meaning that each lens had to be removed, packed away and then replaced every time a change was required. Things were also made more difficult by the fact that the largest magazine these cameras were able to hold equated to a maximum of two minutes’ filming. Lastly, the camera’s finder showed the pictures upside down, a quirk that caused ‘new boys to get permanent cricks in their necks’. In such testing circumstances it is amazing that any of Night Mail was shot on location at all. Watt recalled the stress of capturing the postal’s thirteen-minute changeover at Crewe: During the day we put up scaffolding, mounted and connected the lights, rehearsed the tracking shots, placated the station staff, made sure the people we needed for continuity were called for daily, and waited for 1145pm. Then we shot like mad for those precious minutes. No one dared hold up the mail train, so off it went and our platform was silent and dark. But we weren’t finished … The up mail train for London came in at 1230. With our exposed film now in tins, Pat (Jackson) hopped aboard, and dossed down on the mailbags. From Euston, he taxied to the laboratories, and slept in their

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waiting room until the film had been developed and printed. Then he caught another mail train back to Crewe, and by mid-day we could run our rushes at the local cinema and start preparing for the next night’s filming.33

Clearly, the difficulties of shooting the film helped the filmmakers establish a meaningful relationship with their subject. Take the film’s central dramatic sequence: a trainee is being instructed how to bind mail bags into strong leather pouches; at a precise moment, these pouches are lowered by metallic arm from the fast-moving train into a trackside net, while at the same time, a net is extended from the train to collect mail bags hanging from a series of gibbet-like posts at the side of the track. This is the middle climax of the film. For workers on the travelling post office, this was an exceedingly hazardous process. In 1936 a train driver from King’s Cross had his arm ripped off by a hanging mail bag and in 1937 a driver was killed by GPO equipment at Sandy in Bedfordshire. Indeed, as trains became faster after the introduction of electrification and diesel engines, this rather unsafe procedure had to be abandoned. Things were no easier for the film crew. Watt explained: Chick Fowle volunteered to hang out of a window, just behind the catching net, with a hand-held camera. It was bloody dangerous. Every now and then the net burst, and that would have been the end of Chick … Pat and I hung on to his legs and prayed. All we could see was Chick’s tensed bottom. The run up to the changeover position was endless. The train seemed to be going faster and faster, and I could see that ugly great black bag hanging on its sinister arm, and rushing inexorably at Chick’s head. There was a sudden, frightening crash, as the pound landed in the van ahead of us, and a faint ‘OK’ from Chick. We hauled him in, his eyes streaming from water and the rush of wind. We sat down and looked at each other for a long moment. Now it was over I think we all realised what a foolhardy thing it was to have done.34

The fraught experience of the film crew is reflected in the portrayal of the instructor and his trainee in the film, where the

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trainee’s nervousness is used to build tension. This crucial sequence begins with the trainee turning to his instructor and worriedly asking, ‘Now?’. His instructor shouts back: ‘No, no. You want two bridges and 25 beats.’ The instructor winks theatrically to camera. One bridge flashes by, then another. The trainee begins to count the beat of the wheels. The film cuts to the instructor. Then back to the trainee: 21, 22, 23, 24 …‘Now!’ The pouches drop down and are swept into the net.

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The whole sequence works splendidly despite the fact that the trainee scenario was completely invented by Watt because he thought it the least obtrusive way to instruct the audience. It works splendidly despite the fact that the tum-te-tum rumble of the train is actually the sound of a toy train being pushed back and forward over toy tracks. It’s equally irrelevant that the ‘train’ is for the most part merely a lot at the GPO’s Blackheath studio, with the postmen instructed in true Star Trek fashion to give the illusion of movement by gently swaying from side to side. The scene’s significance rests on the film-makers and their subjects swapping places in a literal and metaphorical way: the documentarists were forced to live like postal workers and the postal workers were invited into the film studio. The process of shooting Night Mail had initiated the film crew into the life of the Post Office and railway workers. The crew appreciatively remembered: If the bag for delivery was swung out too soon, it would have been smashed off by a bridge or a tunnel, or could even have decapitated some unfortunate late traveller loitering on a platform. As it was often foggy or misty in winter, and there were no obvious visual aids, the timing of this operation had to be done solely by sound. So skilled were the workers of this operation that they could tell exactly where they were by the beat of the wheels.35

Reading the memoirs of those involved with making the film, it is obvious that over the course of the shoot, Watt and his team became gradually more and more obsessed with their subject. Pat Jackson recalled: When we’d done all the shooting the fireman let me feed the furnace and I soon realised that there was more to it than just shovelling coal. There was an art in maintaining a level bed of evenly burning coals for a boiler to be given a reliable head of steam. It was not to be learnt in one easy lesson, nor were the muscles built to sustain a hungry furnace with a few sessions in the gym. It was a revelation to realise what the job involved.36

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It could be more broadly argued that (as Grierson’s initial ‘Can we imagine a society without letters’ speech suggests) it was only when real human affection grew between the GPO film-makers and their subject matter, that the Unit’s films advanced beyond either staid pedagogical exercises or simple promotional material. Technical limitations prevented Watt from filming actuality, thus in Night Mail he was forced to sympathetically reconceive the work performed by the travelling post office, in order to capture its essence on film. The instructor’s rather too theatrical wink to camera was symbolic of the growing trust between film-makers and postal workers, as the GPO Film Unit attempted to create a mode of representation free from Flaherty’s fraudulent exoticism and March of Time’s reductive glibness. Watt claimed Night Mail was: Dramatic journalism, without the hysterics and exaggerations of the press. My jokes were awful, my dialogue flat. But it was real and therefore successful, because the public will always recognise the reality … Cavalcanti paid me the greatest compliment when he said, ‘Harry Watt put the sweaty sock into documentary’.37

Watt’s patron, Sir Stephen Tallents went even further. He fondly remembered that Night Mail, like the best of his Film Unit’s work: Had no snob appeal, making falsely glamorous and desirable to humble people the fundamentally commonplace and vulgar luxuries of the rich. It took as its raw material the everyday life of ordinary men and from that neglected vein won interest, dignity and beauty … It differed from Robert Flaherty’s work in that it did not go to the far north or the South Seas in search of the remote or the exotic. It differed from the work of the Soviets in that it was harnessed to no political theme. Owing much to these two sources, it yet enjoyed a greater liberty and struck a more universal note.38

But we should be cautious. Tallents’s judgment was borne on the back of postwar optimism about the vibrancy of the British film

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industry and after some of the Unit’s ethos (and film-makers) had demonstrably carried into the commercial mainstream. In 1936 it would have been faintly ridiculous to champion the ‘universal note’ struck by Night Mail when it was commissioned to be an ‘educational’ item and promoted on its strength as a niche ‘railway film’ to boost the disappointing lending figures of the GPO’s film library. The common-sense reason for commissioning Night Mail was that paeans to the railway grabbed public attention. In 1935 the Great Western Railway (GWR) company had celebrated its centenary by unleashing a massive publicity campaign. There were posters, radio series, jigsaws, an essay competition for boys (which records note ‘an unaccountably large’ number of girls entered) and Railway Ribaldry, a curious book of William Heath Robinson cartoons. In addition the GWR produced The Romance of a Railway. This surprisingly well-received film was directed by Walter Creighton, the EMB’s hapless first film officer.39 Night Mail also undoubtedly appealed to the GPO’s accountants. Spurred on by the GWR’s success, the London, Midland and Scottish company (LMS) saw Night Mail as a great marketing opportunity and were keen to assist the GPO. The award-winning Song of Ceylon, co-funded by the Ceylon Tea Board, had proved that the GPO Film Unit was adept at handling prestige corporate work and LMS, in common with other train companies of the interwar era, was desperate for media attention. The costs of electrification and growing competition from the motorcar were already straining margins and forcing railway companies to develop desperate gimmicks – such as hikers’ mystery train tours – in order to attract business. The GPO Film Unit may have laughingly remembered that the LMS’s film director was ‘the only film director ever known who wore a bowler hat’, but it was his generous assistance that contributed to ‘every imaginable type’ of whistle and engine noise being committed to Night Mail’s atmospheric soundtrack. LMS’s largesse stretched from allowing

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Watt to hang a microphone down onto the tracks through a toilet, to organising the shot of two trains running parallel – even though this meant sending one of the trains hurtling down the tracks in the ‘wrong’ direction. Over the next few years the GPO’s publicity committee was to make full use of its partnership with LMS. The travelling post office marked its centenary in 1938 and, as well as receiving a service upgrade (including electric tea urns for workers and interiors painted ‘a special green to avoid eyestrain’), Night Mail was re-released alongside a lavish collector’s edition information booklet. Stephen Tallents is often credited with the invention of ‘background publicity’, soft news activity that attempts to foster general awareness rather than promote specific messages. Clearly, one factor behind Night Mail’s astounding longevity is that the GPO was able to set the film into railway history so deeply that its reputation now exists to some extent outside of the cinema itself. Railway enthusiasts are apt to speak more lovingly of the film than cinephiles. The reciting of important railway junctions is as iconic as Auden’s verse. As one contemporary observed of Tallents’s methods: Good public relations practice emulates that wise bird, the cuckoo. It gets other birds to sponsor its eggs and, when really successful, gets the other birds not merely to hatch the egg, but to regard the fledgling as their favourite offspring.40

Culturally Night Mail tapped into an interwar vogue for rail settings that it is perhaps difficult to credit today. Two of Britain’s foremost film talents, Michael Balcon and Alfred Hitchcock, were self-confessed rail anoraks who took advantage of the publicityhungry rail companies’ willingness to co-operate by turning out films such as The Wrecker (1929), The Ghost Train (1931), Number Seventeen (1932), The Secret Agent (1936) and The Lady Vanishes (1938).41 There had even been a British thriller, called Night Mail, released in 1934.42 Rail was similarly enveloped in a high-art allure

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that stretched from Diaghilev’s Le Train bleu to Eric Ravillious’s mysterious modernist landscapes. Puritan documentary it may have been, but Night Mail’s promotional artwork made a romantic appeal: steam trains by the light of a cloud-obscured moon. Similarly, the film was self-consciously promoted to downmarket papers as a ‘real-life ghost train thriller’. The GPO’s marketing men did not primarily see Night Mail as a parable expressing the interdependence of man. Instead, the film allowed them to capitalise on the mildly deviant mystique that first attached itself to the travelling post office in the days of the highwayman and lasted at least until the Great Train Robbery of 1963. Or as the critic Dai Vaughan had it, ‘It is difficult to believe that a film, Day Mail, would have entered the public consciousness in that peculiarly compulsive way which establishes a work as a classic, even to those who have not seen it.’ 43 Watt soon fell in love with the subject himself, admitting: Night Mail was promoted more like an expressionist thriller than a sober documentary

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We had one of the days of our lives, as we were given an engine all to ourselves to go up and down the famous Beattock climb into Scotland. We were still three youngsters and the fun and excitement of having our own engine was tremendous … I had become fascinated with the engine – what is it that makes people so mad about railway steam engines? – and I wanted a coda at the end of the film, of the engine, still dirty and hot after its night’s labour, being cleaned down, oiled and greased.44

More generally, and of less interest to Freud, the GPO Unit had already dipped into the subject area. Humphrey Jennings’s (very short) short Locomotives (1934) attempted to explain the development of the railway with shots of miniature trains at the Science Museum, South Kensington set to Schubert. Night Mail simply swapped small models for bigger film lots, and recordings of Schubert for original work by Auden and Britten. Although the marketing and promotion of Night Mail embraced cultural trends the documentary movement more usually despaired of, its most obvious cinematic forebear is Victor Turin’s Turksib (1929). Turksib detailed the construction of ‘the first Soviet railway’, a monumental feat of engineering constructed during Stalin’s Great Leap Forward to enable trade between Turkistan’s cotton fields and Siberia’s timber merchants. Turin, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had worked in Hollywood before returning to Soviet Russia, offered his film in opposition to artless documentaries mechanically spliced together from ‘a hodge podge of shots’. Wright recalled: Turksib dramatically brought to life an economic, social and geographical problem … (but this became) in Turin’s hands an exciting and inspiring film. His images, in terms of communities seen largely through individual and personal needs, were built up through crosscutting, not merely shot by shot but also sequence by sequence, to a point when a sudden shout of a locomotive starting off in a cloud of hissing steam seemed not just a solution but a veritable god from heaven.45

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Victor Turin’s Turksib

Turin’s ability to evoke grand social developments with the Soviets’ spartan film-making resources proved inspirational to the similarly impoverished British documentary movement. Indeed, John Grierson invited Turin to present his film to civil servants at the EMB in a bid to convince the British establishment of the power of documentary. It was an invitation that led to Grierson, and Night Mail’s co-director Basil Wright, writing the English titles for Turksib.46 Unsurprisingly, there are important stylistic similarities between Turksib and Night Mail. Like Turksib, Night Mail attempts to add formal experimentation to audience enlightenment. The two films share a love of big close-ups of wheels, pistons and general shots of machinery that build momentum to the films’ narratives and give urgency to their political purposes. Turksib’s titles vary in length and type sizes, while Night Mail’s commentary varies in style, accent and volume. Both films also attempt to make maximum metaphorical capital from the image of the train. The train is characterised as a medium for connecting physical and social spaces, linking an everyday postbox in Bletchley with the mines of Wigan, steelworks of Warrington and machine shops of Preston. It is an industrial enabler and social integrator; the path of its tracks marking out a newly democratised space. One of the few Soviet pictures to be approved by the British censor, Turksib established itself as a fixture on the trade-

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union film circuit and created a context through which Night Mail could be understood. However, while Night Mail’s occasionally blustering commentary, ‘Four million miles, every year! 500 million letters, every year!’ bears resemblance to the titles of Turksib, its weak jokes, digressions and delight in human twitterings obviously do not. There aren’t any Soviet films where impish postmen cheekily lob bundles of mail at each other as hard as they can. There isn’t any dialogue in Dziga Vertov that sees the proletarian exclamation, ‘Take it away, sonny boy!’ answered with a chirpy, ‘Right-ho, handsome!’. Ultimately, Night Mail is of interest because it marks the point where British documentary began to throw off its early influences and develop its own distinctive character. The prominent Observer critic, Caroline Lejeune, noted at the time: It is clear, I think, that documentary will shortly part in two directions … The policy of documentary until now has been to dramatise inanimate and abstract things: the routine of the weather report, communication by rail, air and telephone, the building of a liner, the programme of agriculture. That is a sane beginning, a clean, logical beginning. Now the documentary must go further. It must dramatise the lives of the men and women whom these facts involve … It must go beyond types to individuals. It must borrow something from literature, and endow the conditions of human life with something of the rich human character which Shakespeare and Dickens drew.47

This astute observation was borne out by the bitter arguments between Basil Wright and Harry Watt that marked the making of the film. Watt and Wright’s creative wrangling is indicative of the creative contradiction that powers Night Mail. Just as the Petts clashed with the Potts, the high-modernist Wright fought with the human-interest story-favouring Watt. This conflict would definitively influence the future of the GPO Unit and the direction of documentary filmmaking in Britain.

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3 Harry Watt vs Basil Wright Film critics have long remarked that Night Mail is an uneven film. Despite its fame, it is often grudgingly praised as a film of brilliant sequences rather than of sustained brilliance. Similarly, Night Mail‘s success should have provided the ultimate justification of the GPO’s co-operative ethos, but instead it is often used to provide a case study of the GPO Film Unit’s limitations. The film’s main credit, ‘Produced by Basil Wright and Harry Watt’, is emblematic of its split personality, the odd title marking the beginning of a longlasting feud. Until the end of his life, Harry Watt unerringly maintained: All I know is that I directed every foot of the picture. That is, I chose the visuals, showed the cast what to do, wrote the dialogue and, from Wright’s notes, planned the overall shape of the film. The aesthetic highlights, that is Auden’s poetry, Britten’s music and the overall editing, were the ideas and work of Wright and Cavalcanti, under Grierson. If anyone was to make an analysis of my films, he would see it all starting in Night Mail.48

Basil Wright, however, never entirely conceded authorship. He claimed that Night Mail expressed his vision, ‘the film as it was finished (up to the Auden–Britten section, which was an afterthought, anyhow) more or less followed the shape of the script I’d written’. Still, film-makers contesting the importance of their respective contributions to a film’s success is hardly an unusual phenomenon. The interest in Night Mail stems from how far the joint credit of Harry Watt and Basil Wright reflects deeper creative and political schisms within the GPO Film Unit. Ironically, Night Mail, a film dedicated to the virtues of co-operative labour, started the Unit’s first recorded fight over individual credits.

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It has often been argued that Basil Wright represents the civicminded ‘Griersonian’ position on documentary cinema. Harry Watt, on the other hand, was less interested in educational cinema than human interest-led entertainment. In other words, Wright’s conception of Night Mail as a picture composed of Soviet-style montage and statistics, clashed with Watt’s Night Mail of narrativebased realism. There is plenty to recommend this assessment. Basil Wright was John Grierson’s first recruit. He played the role of trusted lieutenant as the EMB Film Unit expanded to include Arthur Elton, Edgar Anstey, Paul Rotha, Stuart Legg and Harry Watt. If Grierson was the outré public-sector movie mogul then Wright was the colourless stooge. Indeed, because none of the EMB’s initial crop of film directors can be said to have made a decisive artistic, commercial or ideological mark on the history of film outside of the ‘documentary school’, this entire group of directors (with the exception of the equally spiky Rotha) have often been reduced to the status of Grierson’s playthings. A contemporary film critic complained: If anyone were to ask me to name the keenest critical intelligence (in British cinema) without hesitation I would plump for John Grierson. If anyone were to ask me the most dangerous influence directed towards the development of new production, I should give the same answer ... He is gradually developing into a paper-director, and the EMB would be wise to cut him loose from the cares of an executive position, and send him off with a camera and a definite order to deliver. Outside, and on a job, I believe Grierson might prove himself our best native director. Inside, on someone else’s job, he’s becoming a rather tiresome tradition.49

Basil Wright’s career often looks like a case study of an individual talent being destroyed by ‘a tiresome tradition’, because the Sherborne-educated Wright clearly pined to produce something more aesthetically exquisite than the EMB generally attempted. In his first short, The Country Comes to Town (1933), Wright attempted to

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Harry Watt

leaven a film extolling the virtues of factory farming with imaginative editing. Arthur Elton had tried something similar in An Experiment on the Welsh Hills (1932) by inserting images that aped the Ukrainian stylist Alexander Dovzhenko into a dreary film that concerned scientists’ efforts to grow a grass persistent enough to weather the bleak Black Mountains. Grierson responded angrily to these innovations, claiming that the only ‘higher purpose’ EMB filmmakers should serve were the aims of the EMB. He would later contest: I am not interested in single films as such, only as they contribute to a larger thesis – and individuals likewise. Film cannot of its nature be a purely personal art, except, as it were, in miniature and on one’s own money. A few have managed it but they are not significant. The nature of cinema demands collaboration and collusion with others and with many variant purposes; and its significance derives from those who can operate and command purposively within these conditions.50

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Thus it has seemed to historians that Wright’s potential was partially bullied out of him, and partially smothered, by the rigidity of the ‘Grierson school’ of film-making. After beginning his career with the internationally acclaimed art documentary, Song of Ceylon, Wright disappointingly directed less and produced more. His sensitive production of imaginative pictures such as Humphrey Jennings’s, A Diary for Timothy (1944) and Jack Lee’s Children on Trial (1946) showed glimpses of a rare intuition that he appeared all too willing to disown. In print Wright rather pathetically begged Grierson not to condemn the mildly unorthodox views expressed in his 1948 pamphlet, The Use of Film, while hopelessly acknowledging, ‘I have not the least doubt that you will tear it to bits.’51 That the final phase of Wright’s directing career saw him make a comfortable return to a more high-art milieu in films such as Stained Glass at Fairford (1956) and Greece: The Immortal Land (1958) only adds to the sense of frustrated potential. Harry Watt surmised of Wright: Basil Wright

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He was a dark, intense ascetic, with a great deal of the poet in him … and was always kind and helpful to me. He had the misfortune to be rich, which I always felt to be a drawback to a creative artist. Like hungry boxers are the best boxers.52

It is impossible to judge if Watt’s somewhat clichéd pen portrait is accurate, but certainly Wright seems to have suffered from a lack of conviction. In his autumn years Wright would record his admiration for Dovzhenko’s ‘creative documentaries’, but it would be an admiration tinged with wariness. Dovzhenko’s work was sui generis wrote Wright, and the Night Mail director cautioned others against following the ‘narrow jungle path that leads to pure lyricism’. It was a path that Wright had himself abandoned after Song of Ceylon.53 If Wright exemplified the strangely cowed character of the pioneers of British documentary film-making, Watt belonged squarely to the more rebellious half-generation that followed. Watt, like another of Grierson’s bêtes noirs, Humphrey Jennings, soon came to identify more with the newly arrived Alberto ‘Cav’ Cavalcanti than with the documentary Unit’s iconic chief. Cavalcanti was a deepthinking Brazilian film-maker with an interest in (and personal connections with) the surrealist movement as well as a useful track record in commercial cinema. Wright and Watt both agreed that his arrival from Paris in 1934 marked a turning point for the GPO Film Unit. Watt paid tribute: British documentary films would not have advanced the way they did from then on without Cav’s influence … I’ve never known what arrangement he made with the GPO, although I’m certain he was never paid enough. It must have been difficult for Grierson when we technicians more and more turned to Cavalcanti with our problems, but he was honest and shrewd enough to realise how much more polished and professional our films were becoming under Cav.54

Cav’s influence extended beyond technical competence; the Brazilian’s arrival had a political effect. John Taylor described how

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Cavalcanti’s arrival at the GPO ‘was the beginning of a division’ that split the Unit into two camps, while Paul Rotha claimed that pieces of Cavalcantian foolishness such as Pett and Pott were calculatedly ‘mischievous’ and designed to cause umbrage. In old age, Cavalcanti recalled the crux of his disagreements with Grierson in characteristically tangential terms. He told Sight and Sound: I had a very serious conversation in the early, rosy days with Grierson about this label ‘documentary’ because I insisted that it should be called, funnily enough (it’s only a coincidence, but it made a fortune in Italy), neo-realism. The Grierson argument – and I remember it exceedingly well – was just to laugh and say, ‘you are really a very innocent character. I have to deal with the government, and the word documentary impresses them as something serious, as something …’ I said, ‘Yes, as something dusty and something annoying.’ But that was his argument, that documentary was a kind of name that pleased the government.55

The difference is illustrative: Grierson was a social scientist attempting to use new media to respond to the challenges of a newly enfranchised democracy as outlined by his pessimistic mentor, the lapsed liberal intellectual, Walter Lippmann. Conversely, Cav was an industry figure, a remarkably erudite and able director, but nonetheless a man doggedly devoted to the muck and glamour of a career in commercial cinema. Cavalcanti may have resented hack work but he was not above it. For him, GPO films needed to work primarily on the commercial circuit. Grierson (and his prodigies) were more circumspect. The industry had failed Flaherty (Nanook had been funded by a fur-coat manufacturer) and showed little enthusiasm for the possibilities of the nascent documentary form. The aim of the Grierson school at the EMB and GPO had been to use corporate and government patronage to build up a non-theatrical distribution network – to provide an alternative infrastructure to the existing commercial chains. Before the television boom and pre-Arts Council (or British Film Institute) patronage, the threat of a film trade homogenised by Hollywood features loomed large. As it has turned out, the nature, education and arts programmes

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Harry Watt directing The Overlanders

that Grierson championed have become defining characteristics of British television, while the heirs to the GPO’s avant-garde wing (the Len Lyes, Lotte Reinigers and Norman McLarens of today) are now to be found in contemporary art galleries. At the time, the split between those film-makers who wanted to create an ‘alternative’ film culture and those resigned to working in the existing one was crucial. Grierson would maintain that Night Mail mattered because it built on the montage techniques of the Soviet auteur, Sergei Eisenstein. ‘If you want to know where the courage of poetry in Night Mail came from’ he directed, ‘then you must go for your answer to Old and New [1929] or to Romance Sentimentale [1930].’56 Alternatively, the ‘deep and glorious belly laugh’, which Night Mail won from the audience on its première, jolted Harry Watt and Pat Jackson onto an entirely different film-making trajectory. They realised: How snooty; how high-brow; how elitist we were. Cat’s whiskers, or is it pyjamas, we thought we were. Compensating like mad, of course, because none of us thought we would make it into the Big Pond of the ‘Big Time’. Snoot was the obvious defence mechanism.57

Night Mail was important to them primarily because people ‘actually enjoyed it’. Hence, Alberto Cavalcanti and Harry Watt eventually

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moved to Ealing Studios, to work on commercial films such as Dead of Night (1945) and the Australian Western, The Overlanders (1946), while Grierson worked at UNESCO before becoming the first head of film at the Central Office of Information (COI). He spent his declining years presenting the long-running Scottish television series, This Wonderful World. Similarly, Basil Wright worked on UNESCO film projects before becoming a governor of the BFI as he increasingly turned to teaching. In this context it’s unsurprising that the completion of Night Mail was marred by a change of atmosphere within the GPO Film Unit, which had been an amazingly tight-knit organisation, remarkably free of prolonged ego battles and unhealthy rivalries. Grierson believed that film was a co-operative process and he frequently praised his documentary film-makers’ humility and selflessness (although, as many others have pointed out, rather hypocritically, Grierson was a shameless self-publicist himself). After his hard work on Night Mail, Watt expected due credit. He remembered: When I saw the credits of Night Mail, I was shocked. The main credit was ‘Produced by Basil Wright and Harry Watt’. But I hadn’t produced it, I’d directed it! I demanded that I have my name separate from Wright’s, in letters as tiny as Grierson cared, and he refused point blank. My only answer Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth (Zemlya) made a lasting impression on Basil Wright

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would have been to resign, and of course, I didn’t. Grierson, one of the world’s greatest salesmen, double talked me round, and I ended up working in the garden (Grierson owned a small holding in Kent). But I never forgave him for this.58

Cavalcanti also later accused Grierson’s idiosyncratic approach to compiling credits as mean-spiritedly writing the significance of his contribution to the documentary movement out of history. Cavalcanti complained, ‘on Night Mail I have the credit for “sound direction”, which doesn’t even exist as a credit’. Grierson retorted that Cavalcanti had asked for his name to be kept off the GPO’s credits in case his association with an avant-garde documentary unit undermined his standing in commercial cinema. However, these quarrels lay ahead. When Night Mail was shot, any differences of approach and intention were still surmountable. Grierson was by no means a philistine. Equally, Cavalcanti was committed to placing his avant-garde techniques at the service of realistic material. Night Mail’s striking predecessor, Coal Face (Alberto Cavalcanti) provides a fruitful example of their collective imaginations working in tandem. The film’s mining sequences were shot by Stuart Legg, Humphrey Jennings and Basil Wright, while Cavalcanti, Walter Leigh and Benjamin Britten contributed sound effects and W. H. Auden made his first verse contribution to the GPO Film Unit. It was, as Cavalcanti had it, ‘a dress rehearsal for Night Mail’. Coal Face’s images of men among mining cars are replicated almost exactly in Night Mail, except the miners have been replaced by postal workers pushing parcel trolleys. More significantly, both Grierson and Watt shared a fundamental romanticism: the famous closing Beattock sequence of Night Mail blends the efforts of the steam engine driver with sentimental dawn-soaked images of lush Scottish countryside. Indeed, the shots of rabbits running for cover and dogs attempting to outrace the train were particularly charged with nostalgic sentiment for Harry Watt, because the Scottish director shot them on the border

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farm where he spent several of his childhood years. The fact that these shots are overlaid with the sob-throated voice of John Grierson brings the film to an emotional swell. It is worth remembering that Harry Watt claimed he was given a job at the EMB because he had served at sea (and as the EMB/GPO’s disproportionate number of maritime features attest, Grierson was obsessed by the sea) and because he was a Scot. ‘The Scots’, wrote Watt, ‘are like Jews, they have relations everywhere.’59 Cavalcanti and Wright saw the blend of the train driver’s effort with dawn-soaked images of lush Scottish countryside somewhat differently. For them, the wet-eyed emotion of Watt and Grierson was just another element to be superimposed in a delirious rush of speed, steam, sound effects and contemporary poetry. They were not attempting to identify with working-class life but to employ modernist techniques to mythologise it. The climactic torrent of noise and poetry also added some much-needed impetus. It was an aesthetic solution dreamt up to, as Paul Rotha put it, ‘get the damned train away from Crewe and hurl it across the border into Scotland’. Night Mail lacked the sense of closure afforded by a classic characterdriven narrative, Cavalcanti and Wright’s formal flourish papered over the gaps in the film’s structure by supplying a finale. It was a tactic that had previously been used in Wright’s Song of Ceylon and an earlier film of Watt’s, the outrageously tedious BBC–Droitwich (1935). More than most films, Night Mail was a team effort. Interestingly, it was not the genesis of Night Mail that appears to have fermented the Unit’s personal and political fissures, but its success. Night Mail was born of a utilitarian, socially conscious tradition. The film’s subsequent popularity with a wider audience encouraged GPO film-makers to become more aesthetically and politically ambitious. Paradoxically, the more successful Night Mail became, the more documentarists were apt to believe they had outgrown their own movement. Basil Wright claimed that after Night Mail, Grierson encouraged him to work on films more directly related to the pressing

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Harry Watt was particularly proud of Night Mail’s human touch

political and social issues of the interwar era. London County Council (LCC) had fallen to Labour in 1934 and the gas and electric industries were keen to earn favour with LCC leader, Herbert Morrison, by associating themselves with social reform. Thus money became available for films such as Housing Problems (Edgar Anstey and Arthur Elton, 1935) and Enough to Eat? (Edgar Anstey, 1936). Emboldened, Grierson increasingly looked outside the GPO for funding. As the decade drew to a close, this funding allowed Wright to produce the more politically ‘engaged’ The Smoke Menace (John Taylor, 1937) and Advance Democracy! (Ralph Bond, 1938), the latter funded by the Society of London Co-operatives.60 Meanwhile, once Grierson left the GPO in 1937, the Film Unit pursued a more avowedly ‘professional’ course. Cavalcanti’s reign at the GPO balanced the production of daringly different titles like Norman McLaren’s Love on the Wing (1938) and Humphrey Jennings’s Spare Time (1939) with more straightforward, commercially polished, productions. Accordingly, when Harry Watt and Humphrey Jennings produced the classic GPO/Crown Film Unit documentary on the Blitz, London Can Take It in 1941, they felt the full force of the Griersonians’ wrath. Grierson and his charges acknowledged the film’s emotional impact, but they considered it intellectually inept. They argued:

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There was a great fuss over London Can Take It. It was a huge sympathy getter and a great theatre success and it is of course beautifully made. But, in common with a minority of American observers, I thought its secondary effect wrong … In London Can Take It, there was the background suggestion of the old gentleman dying with dignity in the Horatian style, ‘though the skies fall’. The German war records, which I find powerful, both technically, and from a propagandist point of view, are, in contrast, full of youth and going places and of being certain of the future.61

From a propagandist point of view Grierson and Wright may well have been correct, but their attitude betrayed a certain bitterness. First, Grierson had already been personally marginalised from the Unit he had created and now the Grierson tendency appeared to be meeting the same fate. Wright’s drift from narrative cinema to a flatter, more journalistic style, ultimately proved an aesthetic dead end. In his memoir, Pat Jackson argued that in Night Mail: Harry showed the way forward towards a more compelling form of presentation. In short, the story approach, the use of drama, dialogue and characterisation instead of the straightforward commentary expositional exposé of a subject … If Basil Wright, who had initially researched the subject had fully developed those action sequences he would have discovered the Basil Wright’s preference was for sharper imagery that was easier to manipulate for aesthetic and political effect

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value of a dramatic presentation and sensed the power of suspense, and he would have used these weapons in his later work. He never did. He remained imprisoned in the expositional mould, as did the original disciples of Grierson.62

As it is, Night Mail’s qualities clearly stem from the partnership between Wright and Watt. Watt’s uncomplicatedly direct approach was deepened by Wright’s self-conscious modernism, while the emotional vocabulary of Wright’s experimental techniques was forced to expand to embrace Watt’s humanism. That the film’s iconic Beattock sequence is usually remembered through the words of W. H. Auden and the music of Benjamin Britten, illustrate that it would be a mistake to assign the film’s qualities to one man. Ultimately, the GPO Film Unit was a hothouse of unstable collaborations; Night Mail is its outstanding testament.

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4 Alberto Cavalcanti, Benjamin Britten and the Sound Direction of Night Mail Nothing illustrates the GPO Film Unit’s aesthetic entrepreneurship, or the climate of creative co-operation that it so successfully fostered, more sumptuously than the work of Alberto Cavalcanti and Benjamin Britten on the Night Mail soundtrack. The EMB/GPO Film Unit approached the new world of talking pictures with unexpected daring. Sound may have been brought to the movies by Al Jolson’s smash, The Jazz Singer (1927) but the new technology posed serious economic problems for the commercial mainstream. Cash-conscious producers worried that the substantial investment required to upgrade studios and cinemas would be ruinous if the ‘talkies’ turned out to be a mere fad. Free from the inhibitions of the commercial industry, the GPO was able to attract innovators like Alberto Cavalcanti. In turn, Cavalcanti created an atmosphere conducive to some very special talents. Cavalcanti’s case illustrates the trouble which the film industry had in adapting to the coming of sound. The pre-dubbing world was a land of soul-sapping drudgery. Previously, Cavalcanti had been employed on a Parisian Hollywood lot, re-shooting American films into French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Determined to harness the artistic potential of the new technology, he moved to the GPO believing that the Unit’s artistic freedom would more than compensate for the limitations of the GPO’s poor equipment. In general, Cavalcanti’s GPO works deploy sound expressively, with short bursts of music used to enliven mostly silent footage. This was an artistic decision born of necessity – the GPO filmmakers had to share a single sound-recording studio – but even this

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limited intervention could herald dramatic improvement. Harry Watt remembered how Cavalcanti’s skills salvaged his still barely watchable, BBC–Droitwich: The end sequence which Cav found dull was a completely conventional piece of film presentation such as you still see daily – God help us – in so-called documentaries on TV. To show what Cav did with it I’ll try briefly to describe it. It was the starting up for the first time of huge dynamos and motors that had been installed in the main control room … What Cav did was to scrap the noise of the motors, and put a brilliant sound montage of topical radio programmes in its place. Today, this would seem easy and commonplace. But we only had two lousy channels and no money. So from the radio and records we pinched snippets of singers, comics, operas, orchestras, speakers, announcers, all the most recognisable of the day, and mixed them in and out of each other.63

Alberto Cavalcanti

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The result, wrote the Manchester Guardian, was ‘a fine piece of impressionist cutting’. On the back of such acclaim, Cavalcanti used his avant-garde connections to press interesting French composers such as Marius Gaillard, Maurice Jaubert and Darius Milhaud into documentary service. Equally, as well as Benjamin Britten, the GPO found work for native talents such as Richard Addinsell, Brian Easdale and Walter Leigh.64 Financial expediency also excused Cavalcanti a certain amount of adventurousness, as the GPO could not afford to license pre-existing music. For their pittance of a fee, these distinguished (and soon to be distinguished) musicians were not only required to compose a film’s music, but to conduct the film’s entire soundscape. The GPO’s commissioning of young and leftfield collaborators was thus an unusually starred convergence of Cavalcanti’s exquisite tastes, critical acclaim and financial prudence. Grierson’s views were clear: [If we want] music we find it cheaper to have it written for us. If we want natural sound, the producer drives out and gets it. If we want to orchestrate sound we sit in the sound van and arrange the recording as we think best. If we want to play with sound images, or arrange choral effects, or in any way experiment, we have no-one’s permission to ask and no considerable overheads to worry about, because we do most of the work ourselves.65

The GPO Unit certainly pushed Britten hard. The young composer had been spotted by (depending whose story you believe) a mixture of Alberto Cavalcanti, John Grierson and Basil Wright, and joined the Unit in April 1935, at a major turning point in his life. Suffering from writer’s block and mourning the death of his father, the GPO forced Britten back to work. Incredibly, in the year and a half he spent shuttling between the GPO’s offices in Soho Square and its Blackheath studio, Britten composed twenty-five soundtracks. His diary records resentment at Cavalcanti’s constantly changing demands, but retrospectively, Britten realised the discipline of writing at speed, to order, and to picture, was an invaluable grounding. The

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GPO was also fortunate that the twenty-one-year-old Britten was a film enthusiast, possessed of a fondness for Hitchcock and Walt Disney that enabled him to quickly grasp the requirements of a successful cinematic score. In his first film for the GPO, The King’s Stamp (1935), Britten rather knowingly accompanied the image of a stamp designer scurrying down a spiral staircase with a comically descending piano. Coal Face, Cavalcanti’s ‘dress Benjamin Britten rehearsal’ for Night Mail, provided further evidence of Britten’s ingenuity. Coal Face’s commentary was collated from clippings of Department of Health reports, pasted alongside statistics and phrases noted in libraries and bookshops. The film’s sounds were almost completely constructed from found objects. Britten recorded that it was: Enticingly experimental stuff – written for blocks of wood, chains, (film) rewinders, cups of water etc … I well remember the mess we made, we had pails of water which we slopped everywhere, drain pipes with pieces of coal sliding down them, model railways, whistles and every kind of paraphernalia.66

These unorthodox methods would bear further fruit later in Britten’s career, when the composer would encourage the use of such unlikely instruments as woodblocks, sandpaper and mugs in his children’s and community-directed compositions such as Noye’s Fludde. It has even been suggested that Britten’s work at the GPO ushered in the era of musique concrète twenty years before it became fashionable. In the

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context of Night Mail, however, it merely paved the way for Britten and Cavalcanti to spend their evenings listening to the noises made by trains arriving at Harrow station. Not that Britten, a lapsed trainspotter, would have minded the excuse. Indeed, Night Mail’s influence was also to crop up in several future Britten projects, most memorably, in the 1953 song cycle Winter Words, which saw Britten set Thomas Hardy’s ‘At the Railway Station, Upwey’ to music. By the time Britten sat down to compose the score for Night Mail he had collated a veritable charity shop of music-making bric-abrac that put his Coal Face efforts to shame. Further innovations followed, for example, reversing the noise made by a hard beater on a light jazz cymbal provided the sound of a train swishing through a tunnel. They also experimented with the commentary’s volume levels. Facts about the volume of mail handed by the Night Mail service were to be shouted over the soundtrack, imitating the effect of someone struggling to be heard over a passing train. The scouting mission to Harrow station had evidently not been in vain. This attention to detail was partly engendered by the peculiar lack of leeway Britten was allowed. Composing the music essentially meant mimicking the rhythm of a steam train, a bind that meant sacrificing many of his more visionary ideas. Harry Watt was to shamefully recall his first meeting with Britten: Coal Face’s experimental sound track served as a dress rehearsal for Night Mail

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I knew nothing about music, but, as usual, had decided views on it, so I started right in ‘The music has got to fit the picture, you understand, absolutely fit to a split second. Also, I want it to be rhythmic, to go with the beat of the train. I’ve got a record here …’ And, believe it or not, I then ran an old time jazz record to Benjamin Britten to make my point! It wasn’t ‘Shuffle off to Buffalo’ but something like that. He didn’t bat an eyelid, and merely commented on the extraordinary technical skill there was in jazz.67

Watt’s restrictive commission placed an occasionally frustrating burden on Britten’s options. In a despondent moment he confided to his diary that Night Mail’s music was, ‘not very good’ as ‘one cannot write “music” to these minute instructions, when even the speed of the beat and number of bars is fixed’. The blending of Auden’s poetry into the soundscape constructed by Britten demanded a virtuoso performance. Britten explained the process involved: The whole trouble, & what takes so much time is that over the music has to be spoken a verse – kind of patter – written by Auden – in strict rhythm with the music. To represent the train noises. There is too much to be spoken in a single breath by the one voice (it is essential to keep to the same voice & to have no breaks) so we have recorded separately – me, having to conduct from an improvised visual metronome – flashes on the screen – a very difficult job! Legg speaks the stuff splendidly though.68

Britten’s difficulty is reflected by his struggle to record the soundtrack on schedule. Britten’s score was bashed out in forty-eight hours, while the recording began on 17 January and was not completed for another eleven days. Its technical accomplishment – in the presynthesizer age – is extraordinary enough, but contemporary critics remain awed by its effectiveness. Musicologist Donald Mitchell has argued that, because Britten had responsibility for both the noise and sound of the film, Night Mail avoids the ‘customary friction of intention’ that mars the majority of movie scores.69 Night Mail’s smooth integration of sight and sound, words and music, have

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assured Britten’s work a place in film lore. As Erik Barnouw gushed, ‘The trippingly rhythmical Night Mail narration, written by W. H. Auden and scored by Benjamin Britten, was immensely successful, and became a model for numerous imitations.’70 It also, to the jealousy of many at the GPO, soon secured him a wellremunerated job on the Hollywood film, Love from a Stranger (1937). If the disagreements between Wright and Watt illustrate the GPO Film Unit at its factional worst, Britten’s role in the creation of Night Mail evidences the Unit at its inspiring best, that is, a group packed with passionate, talented individuals learning from each other but working towards a common cause. Britten taught Harry Watt and Pat Jackson musical lessons that would stay with them for the rest of their careers, while gaining much-needed self-confidence and artistic and personal maturity in return. Britten also threw himself into the Unit’s after-hours’ activity by writing for the Communist composer Alan Bush, scoring Paul Rotha’s controversial Peace Film (1936) and producing the song cycle, Our Hunting Fathers, with W. H. Auden. Indeed, Britten, like the film Night Mail itself, was soon to fall completely under Auden’s spell.

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5 Letters for the Poor: The Influence of W. H. Auden Today, Night Mail is nearly always remembered by the four-minute section crowned by Auden’s poem. Tell anyone who has seen the film, ‘This is the Night Mail crossing the border’, and they will more than likely respond, ‘Bringing the cheque and the postal order’. As Auden proudly reflected, ‘We were experimenting to see if poetry could be used in films, I think we showed that it could.’71 Wystan Hugh Auden appeared the perfect recruit for the GPO Film Unit. Like Grierson he was a frustrated educationalist, desperate to connect with the wider world. The period leading up to Night Mail had seen the twenty-nine-year-old Auden attempt to break out of the aesthetic ghetto by producing The Poet’s Tongue (1935), a remarkably inventive anthology for schools, and work for Rupert Doone’s Group Theatre. Like the GPO Film Unit, the Group Theatre was – theoretically at least – run along co-operative lines. However, while it may have attempted to meaningfully include the audience in its theatrical performances, the Group’s obscurity, Rupert Doone’s eccentricity and the lukewarm reactions afforded to Auden’s (and Christopher Isherwood’s) The Dance of Death drew Auden briefly to the cinema.72 Frustrated by the confines of teaching at a Worcestershire Quaker school, Auden’s poetic contribution to Coal Face impressed Grierson enough for him to offer the poet a contract at the Film Unit in the autumn of 1935.73 Auden was taken by the Unit’s lack of pretension and was soon carrying rushes, filming, editing and, occasionally, acting (he played Santa Claus in Calendar of the Year [1936]), tasks which he performed with enthusiasm if not efficiency. Watt remembered:

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I remember him as a tallish, clumsy-looking creature, even worse dressed than we were, with red knobby wrists and hands sticking out of a jacket that appeared much too small for him. Because of his shock of uncombed blond hair and rather blank expression I once described him as looking like a halfwitted Swedish deck-hand – with a posh Oxford accent … To me, at that moment, he (Auden) was only somebody to run along the railway line with a spare magazine, and if he turned up late – as he was inclined to do – he got the hell bawled out of him.74

Nevertheless, Auden contributed to the rich intellectual life at the GPO Film Unit. Following in the footsteps of arts-and-crafts reformists such as Frank Pick and Stephen Tallents, as well as native avant-garde attempts to unify art and design such as Paul Nash’s Unit One, he discussed plans with GPO collaborators for establishing a school for the combined arts. Auden excitedly fleshed out his ideas with Wright, Benjamin Britten and the painter William Coldstream (a future luminary of the Arts Council) and this collectivist vision filtered down into his poetics. Arguably, this personal development made Night Mail’s verse possible. Auden’s work had been gradually moving from a mode verging on the visionary to a drolly rational, knowing idiom. The initial mystery of his début collection, Poems, was evolving into the clipped, controlled style with which he is most commonly associated. Working in a film unit assisted this process, as conditions at the GPO made it impossible to be precious: Auden sat down to write his verse. Being at the GPO Film Unit, he had no pleasant, airy office, looking out on the children playing, and the old men dozing in the sun. He got a bare table at the end of a dark, smelly, noisy corridor … Auden serene and uncomplaining, turned out some of the finest verse he has ever written. As it was a commentary, it had, of course, to fit the picture, so he would bring sections to us as he wrote them. When it did not fit, we just said so, and it was crumpled up and thrown into the waste-paper basket! Some beautiful lines and stanzas went into oblivion in this casual, ruthless way.

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Auden just shrugged, and wrote more. Wright and I can only remember one tiny lost fragment. Auden described the rounded lowland hills that you meet as you enter Scotland, as being ‘heaped like slaughtered horses’.75

Thematically, Night Mail also offered Auden the opportunity to fashion a lyric in keeping with his democratising ideals: the posh Oxford accent did not prevent Auden from penning a compellingly zesty commentary. The poem’s wry domesticity is familiar but charming: Letters of thanks, letters from banks, Letters of joy from the girl and boy, Receipted bills and invitations To inspect new stock or visit relations, And applications for situations, And timid lovers’ declarations.

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The formal discipline and directness of Auden’s poetry was also influenced by its method of composition. Writing to film clips, Britten’s score and the strictures of a stopwatch, it is unsurprising that so much of the poem’s impact comes from the speed of delivery and the interaction between words and visuals. It is difficult to disagree with Auden’s retrospective judgment that his film work was strongest when it sprang from unique particularities rather than generalisations. The warmest and most successful sections of Night Mail are contained in the two ‘slow’ sections of commentary voiced by John Grierson. Here, the poem’s predictable phrasing and occasionally tired half-rhymes are replaced by an almost Blake-like romanticism: Dawn freshens, the climb is done. Down towards Glasgow she descends Towards the steam tugs, yelping down the glade of cranes Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen. All Scotland waits for her; In the dark glens, beside the pale-green lochs, Men long for news.

It is striking how many of the Grierson school’s most powerful films draw inspiration from their chief’s homeland.76 It was certainly no accident that Night Mail followed the route of the ‘down’ special (i.e. London to Aberdeen), rather than the ‘up’ special. Fortunately, Auden was as sentimental about Scotland as John Grierson and Harry Watt. Teaching at a school in Dunbartonshire had prompted him to develop ‘the same sort of feelings for Scotland that many Englishmen seem to get for Bulgaria or Greece’.77 The sympathy between Auden and landscape is significant. Viewed without the ‘Beattock sequence’ the film would lose much, if not all, of its lyrical quality. Basil Wright had suggested the section began with shots of the steam train struggling up the Beattock gradient accompanied by

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‘a voice saying; “I think I can, I think I can”’. Auden’s contribution improved the film beyond all recognition. Thus Night Mail’s verse may have been a product of Auden’s collectivist enthusiasms but it is undoubtedly stronger for evidencing his more idiosyncratic streak. Night Mail is arguably the most widely recognised piece of British poetry produced in the 20th century, its subsequent success and lasting fame a testament to Auden’s desire to engage with a larger audience. ‘Funeral Blues’, arguably the second most widely recognised piece of twentieth-century British poetry, Auden wrote the same year, although it was not popularised until the release of Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994. It is ironic then, that Auden dejectedly quit the GPO Film Unit soon after completing Night Mail’s verse. With the exception of his Oxford friend, John Betjeman (who penned some puzzled lines of encouragement on Coal Face in the Evening Standard), film critics were initially unenthusiastic about his documentary work. His verse for Night Mail was criticised as being

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‘a little two self-conscious and “literary” for the material’ and for ‘striving a little too obviously for the “clever effect”’.78 More pertinently, his GPO Film Unit colleagues did not unanimously value his poetic contributions. Harry Watt had continually opposed the inclusion of Auden’s verse in Night Mail and Britten recorded in his diary that the addition of Auden’s words plunged the production into crisis. Auden responded to this slight by abruptly leaving the Unit and then publicly rubbishing the efforts of his former colleagues. Auden used a review of Paul Rotha’s Documentary Film to damn the documentarists thus: The private life and the emotions are facts like any others, and one cannot understand the public life of action without them. (The documentary school’s) puritanical attitude to reality and entertainment has resulted in films which have many excellent qualities, but to the ordinary film-goer were finally and fatally dull. (Furthermore) because of the irreversibility and continuous unvaried movement of the film, it is not the best medium for factual information. It is impossible to remember the plot of the simplest commercial film, let alone the intricacies of, say, the sugar beet industry.79

Grierson’s Unit was less ‘puritanical’, more monastic. Grierson forbade girlfriends, marriage or any other kinds of sexual relationships, in a manner that almost certainly reminded Auden of the ‘fascistic’ public schools of his youth. Auden complained that he and Coldstream had only to sneak out for a coffee to be suspected of being disloyal. It is possible that Auden’s (and Cavalcanti’s) overt homosexuality also influenced Grierson’s attitude towards them. The emotional insularity of life at the Unit was also exacerbated by the GPO’s criminally low wages and the all-encompassing nature of the work. Auden was simply unhappy with a working routine that fluctuated between enforced idleness and frantic all-night sessions. Perversely, after five months making documentaries at the Film Unit, Auden believed himself to be more removed from reality than before. Thus Auden’s withering attack in The Listener magazine concluded

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by unfavourably comparing the superficial relationship between the documentarists and their subject matter with the financial dependency of the documentarists on their corporate sponsors. He concluded: No reputable novelist would dare write his novel before he had spent years acquiring and digesting his material, and no first class documentary will be made until the director does not begin shooting before he has the same degree of familiarity with his. Inanimate objects, like machines or facts of organisation, can be understood in a few weeks, but not human beings. [Especially as] It is doubtful whether an artist can ever deal more than superficially (and cinema is not a superficial art) with characters outside his own class, and most British directors are upper middle … One remains extremely sceptical about the disinterestedness of large scale industry or government departments, or about the possibility that they will ever willingly pay for an exact picture of the human life within their enormous buildings.80

Southern Railways’ Auden-versed The Way to the Sea

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Nevertheless, despite his strident criticisms, it is worth mentioning that Auden could name only one example of Post Office ‘interference’ in his work at the Film Unit. This occurred when a manager on the telephone exchange unsuccessfully tried to stop filming because he believed that the sight of government officials working in short sleeves constituted a shocking lapse of decorum. Equally, Auden was happy to cash in on Night Mail’s success; for instance, the poet contributed a poem to the Southern Railways-funded promo The Way to the Sea in 1937. His rather jaundiced commentary to this lesser-known film was apparently not corrupted by corporate influence: We pass the areas of greatest congestion; the homes of those who have the least power of choice We approach the first trees, the lawns and the fresh paint, district of the bypass and season ticket. Power which helps us to escape is also helping those who cannot get away just now, Helping them to keep respectable, Helping them to impress the critical eye of a neighbour, Helping them to entertain their friends, Helping them to feed their husbands swept safely home each evening as the human tide recedes from London. But we, more fortunate, pass on. We seek the sea.81

Taken in context, Auden’s indiscreet outburst appears less about the failings of the documentary Unit and more about his acrimonious departure from the GPO, especially as the poet would continue to propagandise public-sector bodies and socialistic causes in films such as the LCC’s The Londoners (1937) until he left Britain for America at the onset of World War II. Auden’s criticisms of the ‘Grierson school’ contain more than a sliver of truth. Indeed, contemporary critics of the GPO Film Unit

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continue to attack the ideological softness at the heart of the GPO’s documentaries in terms that frequently echo his criticisms.82 Historians also tend to prize the documentaries of the 1930s when they concentrate on the shocking deprivations of the era: the writings of George Orwell, the photographs of Bill Brandt and protests such as the Jarrow March, which saw 200 starving miners trek from a suburb of Newcastle to London.83 Night Mail has amazingly little in common with this picture considering the extent to which the 1930s’ slump did impinge on the lives of postal workers. Motorisation had led to ‘efficiency savings’ in the workforce as deliveries were increasingly made by van or motorbike, while the growth of the telephone saw the GPO flooded with women recruits whose employment was used to depress costs. The net effect of these changes was that during the interwar years the GPO’s workforce shrunk, wages fell and GPO profits increased. Night Mail may have been a hymn to labour, yet it was made at a time when many postal workers would presumably rather have had the film’s budget added to their meagre pay packets. This discrepancy has weighed heavily on artists and cultural historians alike. Hence, when the Post Office remade Night Mail on its fiftieth anniversary in 1986, the poet Blake Morrison took thoughtful account of the wider world.84 Morrison’s poem cleverly reclaims the ‘slaughtered horses’ image apparently discarded by Auden, before taking a swipe at the political climate of the day by drawing an analogy between the Depression and Thatcher’s Britain. If Auden’s Night Mail emphasises the noisy hope of progress, Morrison’s struggles to puncture the sinister quiet of deindustrialisation: we come out in the daze of morning to this grey milltown lying under a duvet, its shuttles stopped, its chimneys empty, a town sleeping in now there’s nothing to get up for, where the streets at dawn used to clatter with the clogs of workers but are hushed now under the tread of the postman.85

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In 2002, Tony Harrison was similarly commissioned by The South Bank Show to ‘recast’ Night Mail for the 21st century.86 Unlike the GPO’s original effort, Harrison’s film (entitled Crossings) is a veritable pile-up of headline-grabbing contemporary items and, it must be said, considerably less believable than the original Night Mail because of this. Written in the idiom of a tabloid, Crossings feels too much, if you’ll excuse the pun, like a cuttings job. Big questions are brought up, and then just as quickly thrown away. Issues are named rather than interrogated. The film is as shrill as a locomotive’s whistle. In Harrison’s film the poor deludedly dream of receiving a lottery win, the foot-and-mouth crisis drives a farmer to stuff a gun down his throat and a letter from a mother to her crack-addled son goes disastrously astray. At one point the commentary rails, ‘Fuck you, Night Mail.’ It all seems a tad overstated. Moreover, it is a fallacy to assume that, because Night Mail is not a hard-hitting exposé, it must necessarily present a compromised, and compromising, picture of a difficult era. Of course, Tallents commissioned Night Mail to act as an uplifting promotional piece but aside from its immediate political function – to save the GPO from part-privatisation – it also serves as a historical document of liberal interwar optimism. It expresses a genuine admiration for, and well-placed confidence in, the rising tide of social democracy. Perhaps Auden sensed this. The publication of Letters from Iceland in 1937 saw the poet make a partial reconciliation with the documentary movement he had left so dramatically.87 Letters from Iceland was a co-authored travel guide given a playful modernist make-over. Its clever collection of quotations from travelogues, maps, economic pie charts and photographs taken at funny angles make it a kind of carefree equivalent of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. More relevantly, the book contains a dedication of sorts to John Grierson, reworks the ‘slaughtered horses’ image that Auden obviously never fully discarded from Night Mail and contains several self-depreciating references to his work at the GPO. Most pertinently in Letter to William Coldstream, Esq.:

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And here’s a shot for the Chief – epic, the Drifters’ tradition The end of a visit, the motor boat’s out of the screen on the left It was blowing a hurricane. Harbour at Isafjördur – late summer evening ‘Tatty’, Basil [Wright] would call it I think, but I rather like it. Well. That’s the lot. As you see, no crisis, no continuity. Only heroic cutting could save it Perhaps MacNaughten [Richard MacNaughton co-edited Night Mail] might do it Or Legge [Stuart Legg read the ‘fast’ sections of Auden’s poetry in Night Mail]. But I’ve cut a few stills out, in case they’d amuse you.88

It is doubtful that such self-referential silliness would have amused John Grierson. However, Grierson would have taken comfort in the fact that, despite the deprivations of the slump, the majority of Post Office workers did not resent Night Mail or the work of the GPO Film Unit. Indeed, postal workers had actually agitated for the expansion of the GPO’s public relations department and strongly supported the efforts of their film-makers to secure bigger budgets.

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6 The GPO and Night Mail When Stephen Tallents joined the Post Office its staff were angry and demoralised. Winston Churchill’s Trade Disputes Act of 1927 had isolated their unions and, as the slump took hold, material hardship increased. GPO profits increased by 15.75% between 1925 and 1930, but wages fell by 3% in real terms. Night Mail was part of a massive public relations campaign to combat staff unrest. At the EMB, Tallents had commissioned films and posters to bolster the image of British workers, at the GPO he used modern media methods to try and build the morale of employees. He wrote: Background publicity helps to give the staff of the Post Office a sense that their work is properly understood and appreciated by the public – an effect of publicity of which the importance is only now emerging.89

Contemporaries were understandably suspicious of this function of the GPO Film Unit as it raised uncomfortable questions about the nature of the relationship that existed between the film-makers and Despite Night Mail’s joviality, GPO staff suffered financial cut-backs during the Depression

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Post Office management. They believed the GPO Film Unit’s dependence on civil service management compromised the documentary form’s investigative function. This criticism often ran parallel with an ideological distaste. As Arthur Calder-Marshall put it, ‘Mr Grierson may like to talk about social education, surpliced in self-importance and social benignity. Other people may like hearing him. But even if it sounds like a sermon, a sales talk is a sales talk.’90 More recently, film historians such as Paul Swann have argued that Grierson’s troubled relations with the Treasury had less to do with his politics than with his brazen disregard for official protocol.91 Trawling through the British Postal Archive, it soon becomes clear that the GPO documentaries were more appreciated by postal workers than has generally been assumed. Equally, Treasury hostility to the GPO’s promotional work extended far beyond its dislike for Grierson and the Film Unit. Night Mail must be seen in the context of the GPO’s broader educational work. In contrast to the stunts and silliness which accompanied the GPO’s drive to sell more telephones, their inwardfacing programmes plugged into more sober, self-improving trends that would find popular expression during the war years in everything from the BBC’s The Brains Trust92 to the explosive growth in adult education. Aside from screenings of GPO films, postal workers in the 1930s could sign up to watch private newsreels and scientific programmes. Reflecting Tallents’s philanthropic background, these screenings would often be accompanied by lectures.93 Julian Huxley, for example, led a discussion on the Abyssinian crisis. Equally, despite the profession’s popular and historical reputation for being authoritarian, imposed and anti-democratic, GPO staff had been arguing for the creation of a public relations department through their unions since July 1926, years in advance of politicians, businessmen and other would-be reformers.94 Tallents’s high-profile appointment to the GPO in 1933 was consequently not only welcomed by the dominant Union of Postal Workers (UPW) but

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The UPW blamed rigid civil service hierarchies for the GPO’s lack of innovation

also actively supported. This enthusiasm reflected the UPW’s debt to Guild Socialism. This quintessentially English mixture of anti-state expansionism, medievalism and syndicalism had been fed through the union leadership by the teaching of G. D. H. Cole at Ruskin College, Oxford. State nationalisation was ‘bound up with bureaucracy, red tape and incompetent management’ and thus the UPW’s vision between 1920 and 1960 remained: ‘The organisation of postal workers into a comprehensive industrial union with a view to the service being ultimately conducted and managed as a national guild.’95 Tallents’s attempt to reinvigorate the GPO’s liaison committees and bolster the free flow of information and ideas around the organisation only added to the popularity of his innovative methods. For the duration of Tallents’s tenure, staff organisations could be relied upon to contribute testimonials to his department’s ceaseless campaign to secure more resources. It may be that the reason that Harry Watt remembered the GPO as being staffed by some of ‘the most easy going and sympathetic persons an experimental unit could wish for’, was that the co-operative nature of the GPO’s Film Unit reflected the chapels of the postal workers.96 Critics have long noted the similarities between the working environment of the postal workers in Night Mail and the working methods of film crews:

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The comradeship of the small group, rattling through the night and against the clock, with its levelling of social ranks in the higher interest of the job’s completion, may have more in common with the experience of film technicians than with the majority of the working population.97

Similarly, many of the Unit’s best-known films, Drifters, Coal Face and North Sea, for example, all focus on seemingly interchangeable groups of workers whose individual anonymity belies the social significance of their work. Night Mail gave the Film Unit a template that it would replicate and refine for the next ten years. Watt’s team on Night Mail interviewed railway workers, slept on mail bags and learned how to shovel coal. In World War II the GPO Film Unit (then reorganised as the Crown Film Unit) would apply exactly the same methods to projecting such organisations as the Air Transport Auxiliary (Watt’s Target for Tonight) and the Auxiliary Fire Service (Humphrey Jennings’s Fires Were Started [1943]). In sharp contrast to the UPW’s support for Tallents’s far-sighted publicity programmes, politicians and senior GPO management became increasingly unimpressed. Sir Kingsley Wood had brought Tallents in to salvage the GPO’s reputation. Once the good name of the GPO was restored, the political imperative to modernise GPO film-makers saw their own bonds of comradeship reflected by the postal workers

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dissipated and the GPO’s publicity unit was subjected to less encouraging scrutiny.98 The Treasury had forewarned Kingsley Wood: We recognise, of course, that it is a false economy to provide insufficient staff to control properly the expenditure of the large sum which the Post Office is now spending on publicity. But it is very easy to waste money when a staff is expanded rapidly ad hoc without a clearly thought-out organisation. It is now more than six months since Tallents took up his duties as Public Relations Officer, and we feel the time is not far distant when it should be possible to settle more or less finally the staff and organisation of the branch.99

Wood’s expansion of the GPO’s in-house publicity service was sanctioned on the grounds that it would be more cost-effective than employing private-sector expertise, yet Tallents seemed oblivious to the need to reassure central government. Asked to define what constituted a publicity expert, Tallents admitted ‘the qualities of a “good mixer”, are probably even more important for this appointment than a wide knowledge of Post Office operations’. Tallents’s contention that ‘the work of the publicity section does not readily lend itself to measurement’, conveniently excused his unwillingness to set perimeters for the ‘experiments’ he so willingly sponsored.100 Before Tallents’s arrival, the purpose of publicity at the Post Office was to increase telephone sales. Tallents had broadened that vision, pouring resources and creative energy into a wider definition of public relations. Asked to focus his methods on satisfying shortterm goals, Tallents’s exquisite tastes looked unreliable and inefficient. Indeed, Tallents’s reverential attitude to the art world compromised his publicity plans. He assembled an incredible poster advisory group – which included Clive Bell and Kenneth Clark – that seemed unwilling to take the GPO’s more prosaic objectives seriously. Even the GPO’s school leaflets were problematic, written as they

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were, by world-renowned scholars and all-round perfectionists such as J. D. Beazley. The Film Unit was considered especially shambolic, its director, ‘the artistic and highly unofficial soul of Mr Grierson’, a reckless liability.101 Pressure from the commercial film trade, combined with government cost-cutting, had seen the select committee on estimates called in to investigate the GPO Film Unit in 1934. The committee was enlightened enough to admit that ‘Mr Grierson’s position in the field of documentary films has enabled him to secure a number of competent directors content to work under his direction at rather lower rates of pay than they could command elsewhere’, while remaining firmly unconvinced. Commercial film companies protested that a government-sponsored film unit was unfair competition (companies such as Gaumont British Instructional, for instance, made films for the Board of Trade) while the Treasury simply did not want film directors on the government payroll. Commercial pressure proved relatively easy to outwit. The GPO continued to employ John Grierson, while the GPO’s ‘operational staff’ all joined a newly created private company which the GPO paid a monthly retainer. But such bureaucratic bedazzlement could only buy time. As a new committee of enquiry noted in 1936, a small government film unit could not afford to keep pace with rapid developments in film technology. EMB films had been ‘silent’ and therefore cheap, the GPO’s films were increasingly expensive. Distributed mainly to well-equipped schools and film societies, to accountants, the utilitarian documentary movement looked strangely self-indulgent. Most damning of all was the naivety shown by the GPO Film Unit in its dealings with the commercial world. The GPO was still chasing the distributors of its first two groups of shorts Weather Forecast and Post Haste (both 1934) for details of box-office receipts, let alone payment, in December 1937. In 1935, the GPO had signed a new deal with Associated British Film Distributors (ABFD) in an attempt to increase its negligible audience of regular filmgoers. Night

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Even the documentary school’s critical successes, like Song of Ceylon (1934), were poorly distributed

Mail certainly benefited from this. The film was even popular enough for ABFD to extend its rental rights, but its takings appear to have been modest. In the vast majority of cases, outside of exhibitions, professional groups, film societies and schools, GPO films merely provided cheap padding for programmes built around the latest offerings from Gracie Fields or George Formby. It was therefore no surprise that several months before Tallents’s tenure at the GPO came to an end in 1935, the incoming Post Master General, Major Tryon, suggested the curtailment of the Post Office’s lavish programme of cultural patronage. He advised: It seems to me that the time has now come to take stock of the position and to consider whether each and every one of the many activities which the public relations department has embarked, or has in mind to embark, is, to put it bluntly, worth while and, assuming that it is, whether its development might not be slowed down with advantage … There is also, I think, the danger of the staff becoming a little surfeited with the good things that are spread before them. My conclusion – based, it is true, on rather limited evidence – is that the time has arrived to slow things up and consolidate.102

Paradoxically, as internal scepticism about Tallents’s methods mounted, his external reputation continued to grow. He was awarded

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the Publicity Cup of Great Britain in 1935, a triumph which prefaced the introduction of the Valentine’s Day telegram (designed by Rex Whistler) and the release of Night Mail. At the very moment that Tallents’s successor, E. T. Crutchley, was compiling a devastatingly critical report on the workings of his public relations department, John Reith was recruiting Tallents to a new post at the BBC. To the annoyance of Post Office management, Tallents was able to admit his department worked inefficiently, uneconomically and more instinctively than was prudent because he not only romanticised the Post Office, but his managerial role within it. Grierson paid tribute: The initiative (for the documentary film unit) lay with Tallents … Tallents marked out the habitation and the place for our new teaching of citizenship and gave it a chance to expand. In relating it to the art so variously called ‘cultural relations’, ‘public relations’ and ‘propaganda’, he joined it with one of the driving forces of the time and guaranteed it patronage … It was a strange alliance for Whitehall. The intangibles of art – whether of propaganda or of film – were hardly ‘to be packed into the narrow act’ of a Treasury file; and Tallents’s contribution at the time deserves to go down among the more curious feats of Civil Service bravery.103

The advantages of Tallents’s high-minded public relations programme only became apparent over the long term. His haphazard investment in the GPO’s brand has generated lasting goodwill. Without Tallents’s sincere innovations it is impossible to credit that by World War II the GPO became an affectionate example of a Great British ‘institution that works for you and is worth fighting for’.104 Equally, Night Mail’s resilience stands testament to an era where the provision of distinctive publicly owned utilities was taken more seriously.

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7 Critical Reputation Night Mail is a truly remarkable film. For over seventy years it has beat a pre-eminent path through the cinematic, cultural and political landscape of Britain. It was created out of Stephen Tallents’s desire to produce films that bound the nation together. In his 1933 book, The Projection of England, Tallents had stressed the necessity of creating a new, more democratic, national iconography. By celebrating fixtures of national life such as the FA Cup final, Shakespeare and the Manchester Guardian, he hoped to cast a new national identity better able to encompass the hopes and desires of a populace fragmented by poverty and class war.105 Night Mail was the most successful cinematic realisation of his vision. From the moment of its release a well co-ordinated promotional campaign saw Night Mail open to incredible reviews. One end of the political spectrum saw it as a paean to the establishment. The Sunday Dispatch wordily described it as properly wholesome entertainment, ‘immeasurably more exciting than the trivial erotic contemplations of those alleged authors whose only asset is a preoccupation with a passion that is usually as undignified as it is ludicrous’.106 The Times similarly praised Night Mail for illustrating, ‘the marvellous exactitude with which his Majesty’s mails are distributed and delivered’. Conversely, The Daily Worker, remarked that ‘the cool, competent way in which the men go about their job awakens pride and admiration in those who appreciate the dignity of labour’. Indeed, Night Mail’s ‘realistic’ treatment of its working-class characters was widely acclaimed. The Morning Post wrote that the film’s biggest achievement was obtaining, ‘natural acting from the railway and postal officials concerned, as it is extremely difficult to prevent people from “putting on their best behaviour” when they know they are about to be photographed’. The People was similarly fascinated by the travelling post office workers who, ‘have their own

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vernacular and lead a sailor’s life except that their ship is the train’. Only the Observer’s Caroline Lejeune, an unusually cerebral and committed critic, threatened to dissent: I have, myself, minor cavils to make against the picture. I don’t like its sound in practice, though I respect it in theory. I have a sneaking academic feeling that the use of realistic dialogue, Lancs or Scots or Cockney, spoken in the idiom of the district and deliberately commonplace in its argument, is maladjusted to the highly selective character of the visual images. And I find myself instinctively protective against Mr W. H. Auden’s versifying the later sequences.

But she ultimately found in the film’s favour: It makes a very convincing adventure of something that happens every week of our lives and has been there, ever since the movies began, for the taking … in its bare visual statement of speed and precision and immutability, it is more exciting than any confected drama. And it does suggest a potential film department in which England might feasibly lead and intrigue the world.107

Thus Night Mail immediately burrowed its way into the nation’s cultural consciousness. It was an appreciation that quickly turned to nostalgia. Although the postwar Labour government established the Central Office of Information in 1946 and sponsored an astonishing 500 films during their six years in office, John Grierson became frustrated by the COI’s isolation from the government departments that commissioned their work.108 Unlike its predecessor, the wartime Ministry of Information, the COI was a non-ministerial department and its lowly status often prevented its film-makers from creatively directing their briefs and prioritising their workloads. Grierson complained that the Unit was overwhelmed by, ‘a goodly number of dull wits and fat backsides in complacent and now utterly ugly mediocrity’.109 Instead of tackling the big questions of house, health, nutrition, labour relations,

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international affairs and international trade, the COI was directed towards publicising specific policy areas. Grierson began proselytising the need for a new Night Mail, a documentary that would stoke the embers of the movement’s political, aesthetic and social drive.110 It did not happen. There followed a period of quiet. For much of the 1960s Night Mail looked politically and aesthetically dated, an irrelevance after the innovations of Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, but by the end of the decade its stock was again secure. This renewed respect accompanied the failing health of its surviving producers. Grierson hit 70 in 1968 and old age found him hitting the international film festival circuit in irresistibly irascible form.111 By the early 1970s, international critics were giving Night Mail sober appreciation. Richard Barsam praised its poetic intensity and characteristically British humour.112 Erik Barnouw judged it, ‘Infectious in spirit and style – a cinema classic of lasting interest.’113 Contemporary film critics are generally less impressed. The 1980s saw film critics attack the consensus of postwar British film history as eagerly as Margaret Thatcher set upon the economic and political one. To this day, acclaim for the achievements of the documentary school is invariably couched in endless qualifiers. Even Ian Aitken, a noted celebrant of the Grierson school, concluded that ‘although Night Mail contains some strikingly lyrical shots of the train traversing open moorland … the main body of the narrative, and much of the photography, is handled in a fairly prosaic and unoriginal manner.’114 From a purely cinematic perspective, the film’s legacy is relatively modest, with Geoffrey Jones the only obvious British heir.115 To an increasingly large extent, the film’s cinematic reputation depends on the acclaim of railway enthusiasts. Night Mail’s exalted status in this field was confirmed when the film was named ‘Best Railway Film of the Century’ at the Festival International du Film Ferroviaire in 2000. Paradoxically, while the enthusiasm of film critics remains stilted, Night Mail’s stature in the wider arts world has continued to

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grow. Perhaps reflecting the broad arts-and-crafts-rooted thinking of its commissioners, and the catholicity of talent involved in the film’s production, Night Mail appears to be in almost continuous use as a basis for new art, music, television and poetry. It regularly turns up at the Royal Festival Hall and the Tate and has gradually become a modernist artefact as redolent of its era as the Shell Guides or Penguin books. Indeed, no lesser figure than Melvyn Bragg has described it as, ‘the fount from which not just the British documentary tradition springs but our tradition of arts programmes as well’.116 Most strikingly, Night Mail has also found a new political lease of life. In an era of botched reforms (such as the Post Office’s very own ‘Consignia’ débâcle) the film is increasingly used as a benchmark against which the effect of further ‘modernisations’ of the mail service and, by extension, the public sector can be judged. In 1997, a screening of Night Mail on London’s South Bank was accompanied by a series of artists’ shorts that traded on the film’s curiously accrued political capital. For example, Sian Roderick and Daniel Girogetti’s, Mayday (1997) told the story of how a picture of the newly elected Tony Blair taken at Dover was delivered, via The Western Mail, to the monks at Caldy Island, Wales. Acknowledging similar lineage, in 1998, then Secretary of State for Scotland, Labour MP Donald Dewar, named a train serving Night Mail’s newly electrified West Coast route ‘Grierson’. Thus when the Post Office announced its decision to abandon the travelling post office in 2001, TV channels reproachfully rolled out clips of Watt and Wright’s masterwork in response.117 For newscasters, the dramatic contrast between Night Mail’s unflagging optimism and the current predicament of the Post Office remains an irresistible trope. The film is also the fount from which all manner of British cultural nostalgia springs. Night Mail has also been remade several times with varying success. Tony Harrison’s strident television film, Crossings, reworked the GPO classic to make an unfavourable comparison between the Britain of the 1930s and the Britain of the early 21st century. He provocatively contested:

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Since the 30s of Auden and Britten when the verse and music for Night Mail were written, the modern night mail goes north of the border through a rail network in total disorder. The lady in red with a bounty of post goes north through green fields grazed only by ghosts. The modern night mail threads through the map of coal mining communities thrown on the scrap.118

By the new millennium the letters ‘longed for’ in Auden’s poem had morphed into Harrison’s, ‘final demands that prove the last straw, for desperate men who can’t take any more’. Harrison’s harsh film does not provide a reliable comparison between the social and political realities of today and those of the 1930s. Although the acute selfconsciousness of his work does have the effect of making Night Mail seem attractively innocent in comparison. Ironically, a film that was commissioned as a platform to present the GPO’s most progressively intentioned face was reborn in the 21st century as a barometer of actual cultural and political decline. What an unpredictable and strange journey it has been.

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Night Mail

This is the Night Mail crossing the border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order, Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, The shop at the corner and the girl next door. Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb – The gradient’s against her but she’s on time. Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder, Shovelling white steam over her shoulder, Snorting noisily as she passes Silent miles of wind-bent grasses; Birds turn their head as she approaches, Stare from the bushes at her blank faced coaches; Sheep dogs cannot turn her course, They slumber on with paws across. In the farm she passes no one wakes, But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes. Dawn freshens, the climb is done. Down towards Glasgow she descends Towards the steam tugs, yelping down the glade of cranes Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen. All Scotland waits for her; In the dark glens, beside the pale green lochs, Men long for news. Letters of thanks, letters from banks, Letters of joy from the girl and the boy, Receipted bills and invitations

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To inspect new stock or visit relations, And applications for situations, And timid lovers’ declarations, And gossip, gossip from all the nations, News circumstantial, news financial, Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in Letters with faces scrawled in the margin. Letters from uncles, cousins and aunts, Letters to Scotland from the South of France, Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands, Notes from overseas to the Hebrides; Written on paper of every hue, The pink, the violet, the white and the blue; The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring, The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring, Clever, stupid, short and long, The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong. Thousands are still asleep Dreaming of terrifying monsters Or a friendly tea beside the band at Cranston’s or Crawford’s; Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh, Asleep in granite Aberdeen. They continue their dreams But shall wake soon and long for letters. And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart, For who can bear to feel himself forgotten? W. H. Auden

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Night Mail I Far from the magnets of city and capital, the pull of money, the gold stitched runways, far from all crowds, across the blank plain of the Atlantic, we come to these islands, the loosened edges of a nation, their bits and pieces scattered like iron filings, their hills piled up like slaughtered horses, their rocky outcrops like jawbones clenched against the wind. Here Highland cattle drink from their own shadows, thistles flaunt their spiky coronets, and like a splash of blood against the land’s anaemia, a rush and flush of excitement, spreading the word where words are hoarded, the red post van comes threading its way to meet the mail-plane, that pair of scales balancing in the sky, delicate and clumsy as a dragonfly, which drops in like a friend each morning, kissing with its wheels and its hatch of postbags the upturned face of the earth.

II After midnight, down the long platforms spoking outward from the hub of England, away from where we lie, coupling and uncoupling, the unseen industry goes on, the night mail, work as it sounds still done by men, most of it, the porters with their mule-packs, the sorters at their boxes like bees in a hive or doves in a dovecote,

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the trolleys skedaddling so that no connection shall be missed. Then the dark shivers under the glare of machines – planes moving blindly down the empty air lanes, vans along B-roads lit by cats’ eyes and rabbits’ eyes, trains through cuttings of fennel and elderflower – and like a steamed-up windscreen slowly clearing we come out in the daze of morning to this grey milltown lying under a duvet, its shuttles stopped, its chimneys empty, a town sleeping in now there’s nothing to get up for, where the streets at dawn used to clatter with the clogs of workers but are hushed now under the tread of the postman, his bag heavy with nuisance mail and useless mail, with offers of free films and ads for double glazing, with fliers for tool hire and come-ons to Buy us, a slagheap of bumpf or summonses to pay, not what they want here, a bond come up a job come up, a bigger giro cheque. Yet the heart still quickens at the click of the letterflap, the thud on the mat, all of us hunting the authentic handwritten envelope, the letters from pen-friends or men friends, the letters from mothers or brothers or lovers, and the hope that makes the postman our favourite visitor, his arm stretching like these trains among embankments, not juggety-jug now but smooth with self-importance, like flags or streamers blowing ahead of themselves, as we run on towards the future, its unopened envelope waiting down the line. Blake Morrison

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Notes 1 A Man Called Tallents 1 John Grierson, ‘Sir Stephen Tallents’, The Times, 23 September 1958, p. 13. 2 Quoted in Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene Vol. 1: 1904–1939 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1989), p. 585. 3 Gervas Huxley, Both Hands: An Autobiography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), p. 128. 4 Quoted by John Grierson, ‘On the Course of Realism’ in Charles Davy (ed.), Footnotes to the Film (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), p. 154. 5 Critical assessments of Grierson tend to alternate between seeing him as a sublimely socially engaged film-maker or a corrupted philistine. For various sides of this near eternal debate see Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), Paul Swann, The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and Its Limitations (London: BFI, 1995). 6 Grierson actually coined the term in a review of Robert Flaherty’s Moana, which he described as having ‘documentary value’. Non-fiction films existed long before Grierson, but it was the acerbic Scotsman who decisively conceptualised their cinematic role and wider social purpose. 7 See Alistair Cooke (ed.), Garbo and the Night Watchmen: A Selection from the Writings of British and American Film Critics (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), pp. 49-50.

8 Institute of Commonwealth Studies Library, University of London, Tallents papers, CI34, ‘Letter to B. Bruce’, 2 February 1933. 9 Harry Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera (London: Elek, 1974), p. 64. 10 They were also shown to postal workers (the GPO was then one of the nation’s largest employers) at special screenings. According to GPO records, these were far more popular than film historians usually credit. 11 Pett and Pott was released some eighteen months before the box-office sensation that was the Burlington Gallery’s famed ‘International Surrealist Exhibition’ of 1936. 12 Generally, British popular cinema of the interwar era is under-researched and over-patronised. Matthew Sweet’s excellent Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema (London: Faber and Faber, 2005) provides a good starting point. 13 Tallents suggestively filed the clipping ‘Anti-opium “gags” by Chinese comedians’, The Times, 13 February 1935, p. 13. I am indebted to Miranda Tallents, Mark and Virginia Dessain and to John Pemberton-Pigott for granting me access to Tallents’s private papers. 14 Postal Archive, ‘Public Relations: Committee Notes from the Review of Tallents (1935) and Crutchley (1936)’, POST33/5699. 15 Postal Archive, ‘Publicity: Post Office Services, Posters, Signs’, POST33/4308. 16 Quoted in Alan Clinton, Post Office Workers: A Trade Union and Social History (London and Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1984), p. 294.

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17 To pursue this aim Pick had helped found the Design and Industries Association (DIA), a body which sought to harness ‘progressive’ elements of modernism to the service of social and economic improvement. Tallents served as president of the DIA in the 1950s. See Nikolaus Pevsner, ‘Patient Progress:The Life Work of Frank Pick’, Architectural Review, Vol XCII (1942), pp. 31–48 and for a more recent appreciation, Michael T. Saler, The Avant-garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 18 Questioned about his freakishly advanced commissions, Pick responded: Those who decry posters which require some pains and thought for their understanding underrate the urge to stretch the mind a bit more than usual, underrate indeed the intellectual level of an urban population. It is foolish to descend to an elementary treatment of a subject on the ground that there should be nothing above the heads of the public. The public like something above their heads, if only it is attainable.

19 Quoted in Stephen Constantine, ‘“Bringing the Empire Alive”: The Empire Marketing Board and Imperial Propaganda, 1926–1933’ in John M. Mackenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester and Dover, NH: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 219. 20 A phrase tirelessly repeated by Tallents – towards the end of his life he explained its evolution in ‘Encouraging the Artist’, The Times, 31 July 1954, p. 7. 21 C. R. Attlee, ‘Post Office Reform’, New Statesman and Nation vol. 2 no. 37, 7 November 1931, p. 565.

2 The Making and Meaning of Night Mail 22 In this case, I should stress, it’s an affectionate humour. Matthew Sweet, ‘The Buried Secrets of British Cinema’, The Guardian, 16 February 2007. 23 See the November 1934 edition of Post Office Magazine. Tallents was to spend his twilight years building models for public relations firms, film studios and architects. His company, Cockade, apparently came to international prominence by working with the Royal Geographic Society to produce a studiously accurate ten inch to the mile replica of Mount Everest. Sir Edmund Hillary and ‘Tiger’ Tensing held their triumphant official press call by the model. See E. Williams, ‘The Other Everest’, Journal of the Institute of Public Relations vol. 6 no. 1, October 1953, p. 5. 24 At the publicity committee meeting on 16 October 1935, John Grierson outlined four new pictures: Air Mail, Calendar of the Year, SOS and Travelling Post Office, the film that would become Night Mail. Curiously, Calendar of the Year appears to have particularly caught Grierson’s imagination. He breathlessly explained to the committee that the film ‘is being designed to show the relation of Post Office services to events of public interest and has already covered the Trooping of the Colour, the Derby, Cowes week, the Isle of Man TT races and the Highland Games’. Grierson surprisingly skipped over his plans for the other three films. His vagueness betrayed the organisational chaos of the GPO Film Unit, and perhaps, his waning enthusiasm for the GPO following his involvement in establishing the more glamorous ‘freelance’ documentary organisation, the Association of Realist

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Film Producers. Indeed, although Evelyn Spice completed the Benjamin Brittenscored Calendar in 1937, Air Mail and SOS remain unfinished. 25 Pat Jackson, A Retake Please! Night Mail to Western Approaches (Liverpool: Royal Naval Museum Publications and Liverpool University Press, 1999), p. 24. 26 Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera, p. 73. 27 Jackson, A Retake Please!, p. 25. 28 See Arthur Calder-Marshall, The Innocent Eye: The Life of Robert J. Flaherty (London: W. H. Allen, 1963). 29 The most celebrated example is probably Edgar Anstey and Arthur Elton’s Housing Problems, a documentary that saw East Enders directly addressing the camera to detail life in the slums. Artists associated with the GPO Film Unit would also play a role (along with the maverick anthropologist, Tom Harrison) in the establishment of Mass Observation in 1936. Mass Observation’s investigations into such phenomena as the ‘shouts and gestures of motorists’ and the ‘anthropology of football pools’ in towns such as Bolton and Blackpool marked the cusp of a more democratic age. 30 Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera, p. 61. 31 Jackson, A Retake Please!, p. 26. 32 Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera, p. 83. 33 Ibid., p. 84. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., p. 80. 36 Jackson, A Retake Please!, p. 30. 37 Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera, p. 92. 38 Stephen Tallents, ‘The Birth of the British Documentary (Part II)’, Journal of the University Film Association vol. 20 no. 2 (1968), p. 28. 39 Creighton was eased out of the EMB after presiding over the box-office disaster that was One Family. However, his past as the organiser of military tattoos ensured that he remained a

figure of fun for the documentarists. For more on Creighton’s GWR film see Roger Burdett Wilson, Go Go Great Western: A History of GWR Publicity (Newton Abbot: David St John Thomas, 1987). 40 Institute of Commonwealth Studies Library, University of London, Tallents papers, CI34, G. Huxley, ‘PR – A Talk Given to the Empire Tea Bureau in 1947’. 41 For more on Balcon and Hitchcock’s train enthusiasms see John Huntley, Railways in the Cinema (Shepperton: Allan, 1969). 42 Directed by Herbert Smith it concerns a journalist’s attempt to prevent a violinist assassinating a judge on an express bound for Aberdeen. 43 Quoted in Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins, Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of the Documentary (London and Boston, MA: Faber, 1996), p. 119. 44 Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera, p. 88. 45 Basil Wright, The Long View: An International History of Cinema (London: Faber, 1974), p. 117. 46 Many at the EMB Film Unit shared an enthusiasm for all things Soviet, for instance, Grierson and Wright had first met at the pro-Soviet ‘1917 Club’ in Gerrard Street, London. 47 ‘Films of the week by C. A. Lejeune’, Observer, 8 March 1936. 3 Harry Watt vs Basil Wright 48 Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera, pp. 91–2. 49 Quoted in Paul Rotha, Documentary Diary: An Informal History of the British Documentary Film, 1928–1939 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973), p. 34. 50 See John Grierson, ‘The EMB Film Unit’, in Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on Documentary (London: Collins, 1946). 51 Basil Wright, The Use of the Film (London: Bodley Head, 1948). 52 Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera, p. 40.

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53 Wright, The Long View, p. 118. 54 Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera, p. 66. 55 Elizabeth Sussex, ‘Cavalcanti in England’, Sight and Sound, Autumn 1975, p. 206. 56 Quoted in Wright, The Long View, p. 695. 57 Jackson, A Retake Please!, p. 32. 58 Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera, p. 96. 59 Ibid., p. 35. 60 See Aitken, Film and Reform. 61 The John Grierson Archive, University of Stirling, ‘Letter to S. Tallents’, 9 January 1941. 62 Jackson, A Retake Please!, p. 33. 4 Alberto Cavalcanti, Benjamin Britten and the Sound Direction of Night Mail 63 Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera, pp. 68–9. 64 See John Huntley, ‘The GPO Film Unit’, in John Huntley, British Film Music (London: S. Robinson, 1947). 65 Quoted by Charles Wiffen, ‘From Realism to Utopia: Britain Expressed in the Soundtracks of the GPO Films’ (in a paper given to the 2005 Bradford Film Festival Film Music Conference). 66 Quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1992), p. 63. 67 Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera, pp. 94–5. 68 Quoted in Donald Mitchell, Britten and Auden in the Thirties: The Year 1936 (Suffolk and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2000), p. 84. 69 See Mitchell, Britten and Auden in the Thirties. 70 Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of Non-fiction Film (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 94. 5 Letters for the Poor: The Influence of W. H. Auden 71 Quoted in Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden (London: Heinemann, 1995), p. 144.

72 See Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (New York: Viking Press, 1981). 73 Though the Downs School, Colwall was a Cadbury’s funded institution which was, in fact, relatively radical. 74 Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera, p. 81. 75 Ibid., p. 92. 76 For example, Grierson served on minesweepers during World War I and by centring Drifters on the Scottish fishermen who provided their crews it could be argued that he was – if only subconsciously – honouring the appalling casualties suffered by his comrades. Grierson later claimed: I am a product of the Clydeside school of politics: Maxton, Wheatley, Kirkwood, Gallacher and the rest. But instead of seeking a Parliamentary career I felt I could best use the movies to express on the screen what the Clydesiders were doing by oratory.

77 Quoted in Davenport-Hines, Auden, p. 119. 78 Postal Archive, POST21/430. 79 W. H. Auden, ‘Documentary Film’, Listener, 19 February 1936. 80 Ibid. 81 From The Way to the Sea (J. B. Holmes, 1937). Previously, Marion Grierson had directed Beside the Sea (1935) and Southern Seaside (1935) for Southern Railways. 82 See Winston, Claiming the Real. 83 Although arguably the ‘other’ picture of the interwar era – the growth of ‘Metroland’ Britain – is more neglected than the story of industrial decline. The most famous portrayal of the service industry and light manufacturing boom of the interwar years, and associated migration from the industrial north to the new manufacturing towns of the Midlands and South East, is probably J. B. Priestley’s English Journey (1934).

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84 Night Mail II (Bob Franklin for Television South, 1986). 85 Blake Morrison, ‘Night Mail’, in The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper and Other Poems (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987), pp. 18–19. 86 Crossings (David Thomas for LWT, 2002). 87 See Marsha Bryant, Auden and Documentary in the 1930s (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997). 88 W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland (New York: Random House, 1937), p. 224. 6 The GPO and Night Mail 89 Postal Archive, POST33/5699. 90 Alternatively, ‘there is nothing organic in these false-to-life, true-to-life documentaries. They are all grimly obsequious, like boys toadying to masters or clerks smarming to the boss’ Arthur Calder-Marshall, The Changing Scene (London: Chapman & Hall, 1937), p. 38. 91 Swann’s The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946 is truly excellent. However, in my opinion he underplays the fundamental (and understandable) hostility of the civil service to the Film Unit and Tallents’s wider activities which, although often implicit and politely worded, pervades official records. 92 The Brains Trust was a BBC radio programme that became one of the cultural landmarks of wartime Britain. Every week a panel of experts, originally C. E. M. Joad, Julius Huxley and A. B. Campbell, wrestled with a variety of moral and philosophical questions sent in by the public. Questions ranged from ‘What is the meaning of life?’ to ‘How can a fly land upside-down on the ceiling?’.

93 There is a case for seeing Tallents’s imaginative internal public relations programme at the GPO as enacted criticism of Toynbee Hall’s staid community work. While working in the East End philanthropic settlement, Tallents had grown weary of the monotonously pious approach of its director, the Reverend Samuel Barnett. Tallents doubted Toynbee’s methods would ever be able to realise its Arnoldian aim of ‘bringing into one harmonious and truly humanising life, the whole body of English society’. By producing hymns to national unity such as Drifters, Industrial Britain and Night Mail, and by attempting to develop the idea of an inclusive public realm that existed outside of narrow political loyalties, the British documentary tradition appears to be the cinematic embodiment of a modernised Toynbee ethos. 94 We are not the only body who notice that the Post Office does not make itself sufficiently known. I have many times referred to the deadly dull character of some of the efforts which are expected to attract business… If we could see the old and short-sighted take-it-or-leave-it attitude entirely discredited and a make-the-fullest-use-of-me policy encouraged by the Post Office, the various services would become better known and more popular, and the public would benefit.

Although, admittedly, their lobbying was also motivated by the union’s political humiliation in the General Strike. See Postal Archive, ‘Public Relations Department: Formation, Part 1’, POST33/3576. 95 Quoted in Clinton, Post Office Workers, p. 390.

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96 Watt, Don’t Look at the Camera, p. 64. 97 Quoted in MacDonald and Cousins, Imagining Reality, p. 121. 98 Sir Kingsley Wood served as Post Master General from November 1931 until June 1935. 99 Postal Archive, POST33/3576. 100 Postal Archive, POST33/5699. 101 Ibid. 102 Postal Archive, POST33/3577. 103 Quoted in Rotha, Documentary Diary, pp. 43–4. 104 As well as featuring in the Cambridge University Press series of great English institutions, the work of the GPO was also fondly portrayed in the UPW’s own Post Haste. See Ivor Halstead, Post Haste: The Story of the Post Office in Peace and War (London: L. Drummond, 1944). 7 Critical Reputation 105 In today’s tribal climate, some will find Tallents’s title irritating. However, Tallents’s suggestions also encompass icons from the rest of Great Britain and his general outlook was internationalist rather than parochial. Having said that, the poet Andrew Duncan has produced some interesting, and critical, work inspired by Tallents in The Imaginary in Geometry (London: Salt Publishing, 2005). 106 All newspaper quotes are drawn from the Postal Archive file, POST121/430. 107 ‘Films of the Week by C. A. Lejeune’, Observer, 8 March 1936. 108 Martin Moore, The Origins of Modern Spin: Democratic Government and the Media in Britain, 1945–51 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) provides a fine summary of the myriad of overlapping cultural and political issues surrounding the COI’s establishment.

109 Quoted in Forsyth Hardy, John Grierson: A Documentary Biography (London and Boston: Faber, 1979), p. 172. 110 See John Grierson, ‘The Scope of the Film in Public Relations’, Journal of the Institute of Public Relations, vol. 3 no. 1, September 1950, p. 16. 111 One story has it that minutes into Roberto Rossellini’s L’Etá del Ferro, a five-hour documentary on the history of steel, Grierson let out a guffaw before snorting with laughter, ‘Roberto, you old bastard!’. 112 See Richard M. Barsam, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History (New York: Dutton, 1973). 113 Barnouw, Documentary (New York and Oxford: 1974), p. 94. 114 Ian Aitken, ‘Night Mail’, in Ian Aitken (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, Vol. 2 (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), p. 1002. 115 Although highly acclaimed, Geoffrey Jones films are rarely seen. Allow me to plug the BFI’s super Geoffrey Jones: The Rhythm of Film (BFIVD548). 116 Crossings (David Thomas for LWT, 2002). 117 Night Mail has also been used in this way by the BBC website. See ‘RIP Mail trains’, Friday 9 January 2004 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/ 3382141.stm). 118 Crossings (David Thomas for LWT, 2002).

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Credits Night Mail UK 1936 Produced by Basil Wright Harry Watt Cameras [Jonah] Jones [H. E.] Fowle The GPO Film Unit presents Sound Direction [Alberto] Cavalcanti Sound Direction [Verse] [W. H.] Auden Sound Direction [Music] [Benjamin] Britten Sound Recording [E. A.] Pawley [C.] Sullivan Recorded on Visatone-Marconi

uncredited crew Directors Harry Watt Basil Wright Producer John Grierson Assistant Director Pat Jackson Script Basil Wright Harry Watt John Grierson Editors Basil Wright Richard Q. McNaughton Narrator Pat Jackson With workers of the Travelling Post Office workers of the L. M. S. Railway Length: 2,100 feet Running time: 23 minutes 20 seconds Certificate: U Black & White