Copyright History Today Ltd. Apr 1995The range of subjects in our 'Film in Context' series is intended to be very varied in both subjects and period covered. (Special thanks are due to Dr David Ellwood of Bologna University who originally suggested the concept as well as to Tony Aldgate, Jerry Kuehl and Arthur Marwick, for their further assistance). This month we continue our 'impact of war' theme with a curtain-raiser to our special '1945' issue in May as Jeffrey Richards looks at how Humphrey Jennings' wartime evocation of firefighting heroes produced a powerful icon of Britain defiant against the Blitz.
All countries live by and through A myths, episodes from their history which are removed from their context, shorn of complications and qualification, stripped down to their essentials and endlessly repeated as manifestations of the nation's character, worth and values. The Second World War produced a succession of such myths, one of the most powerful being the myth of the Blitz. It is simply told. In September 1940 German bombers began the systematic heavy bombing of London. From September 7th, for seventy-six consecutive nights, apart from November 2nd, when bad weather frustrated the enemy, London was pounded by the Luftwaffe. Thereafter raids were frequent until May 1941. Buckingham Palace and the House of Commons were hit; death and destruction were extensive. It was the reaction of the population of London--one of heroic stoicism--which gave birth to the myth and to the defiant 'London Can Take It' attitude that was emulated in other industrial centres and seaports to which the Germans later turned their attention.
In the years since the war, historians, whose stock-in-trade is the debunking of myths, have examined the events of the Blitz in detail. Evidence has emerged that there was some looting, there was some panic and there was unrest in the East End about shelter provision. But the general picture of a courageous, determined and good-humoured people surviving everything that the Luftwaffe could throw at them remains substantially intact. The historian Angus Calder in the most extensive and thorough examination, The Myth of the Blitz (1991) confirms that the myth developed immediately and spontaneously and was based on direct observation of how Londoners behaved. It was reported extensively in the press both here and in the United States and the fully formed myth was taken up by the propaganda machine and promoted worldwide.
One of the media by which the myth of the Blitz was perpetuated and promoted was the British documentary film movement. Nurtured and promoted by John Grierson in the 1930s, with the aims of producing an authentic picture of the real life of the common people and of educating the nation for participatory democratic citizenship, the documentary movement committed itself fully to the war effort. The GPO Film Unit, which had produced films promoting the virtues of the postal service, was transformed into the Crown Film Unit, and came under the aegis of the Ministry of Information, which prescribed for film-makers during wartime the principal themes of 'Why We Fight', 'How We Fight' and 'The need for sacrifice if the war is to be won'.
Ian Dalrymple, head of the Crown Film Unit, explained in 1941 the documentarists' aim:
We say in film to our own people 'This is what the boys in the services, or the girls in the factories, or the men and women in Civil Defence, or the patient citizens themselves are like, and what they are doing. They are playing their part in the spirit in which you see them in this film. Be of good heart and go and do likewise'. And we say to the world, 'Here in these films are the British people at war' ... It has seen the truth and it can make up its own mind.
So their central theme was 'the People's War'. The myth of the Blitz was a prime example of 'The People's War' and it was to be memorably celebrated in one of Crown Film Unit's most notable productions, Fires Were Started, directed by Humphrey Jennings.
Jennings, Cambridge intellectual, poet, painter, literary critic, filmmaker, had scattered his talents in many directions before the war. He had been an organiser of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936 and a founder member of Mass-Observation. But with the outbreak of war he found his questing mind more and more drawn to the war effort and its relation to the nature of England and the English. He found the ideal medium for his purpose in documentary film. In one way his films were intensely and deliberately personal, but in another, by addressing themselves to the nature of England, they were resoundingly public.
Working for the Crown Film Unit and producing mainly short films for non-theatrical distribution at home and overseas, Jennings in his language and his imagery managed to capture the soul of the nation at war. London Can Take It (1940), co-directed with Harry Watt, depicted how London was standing up to the Blitz. Its key images were used and re-used in post-war television documentaries about the period until they became etched on the collective consciousness as an indelible record of the events. The Heart of Britain (1941) examined the effects of the war on the provinces. Listen to Britain (1942), co-directed with Stewart McAllister, evoked the myriad sounds of the nation at war. The Silent Village (1943) movingly recreated the Lidice massacre in the Welsh village of Cwmgiedd. A Diary for Timothy (1944-45) interpreted the events of the last winter of the war for a newly born child. In 1943 Jennings directed his only feature-length film, Fires Were Started. All his films fulfilled exactly the three requirements for propaganda films laid down by the Ministry of Information. Together they decisively shaped and defined the image of Britain at war that was to be circulated round the world and handed on to the generations to come.
Jennings' film style was crucially influenced by his two great pre-war influences: Surrealism and Mass Observation. The aim of the Surrealists--to present 'a solidified dream-image'--was achieved by the technique of juxtaposing apparently incongruous elements in order to upset traditional modes of perception and thus liberate the imagination. So Jennings and his regular editor, Stewart McAllister who shared his belief in creative juxtaposition, consciously planted striking images in the films, like for instance in Fires Were Started the shot of a terrified horse being led to safety through the smoke. This was not a casual piece of observation but was scripted and designed in advance of the filming. Mass-Observation was set up as a precise anthropological study of everyday reality and this too informed Jennings' approach to his subjects--a desire to record the lives of ordinary people accurately and truthfully.
Jennings' world-view was crystalised by the war and in a very real sense his films stand alongside George Orwell's essays The Lion and the Unicorn and The English People in articulating a robust Socialist patriotism, a full-blooded love of England and the English. This love centred on three basic principles: his admiration of the common people, his instinctive belief in individualism but within a wider community ('we like to think of ourselves as a family' he said in a later film Family Portrait) and his love of English culture. Several commentators have stressed the importance to Jennings of music. Music of all kinds was integral to his films, but it also influenced their structure. William Sansom recorded: '... his films were composed in the swelling-dying, theme and repeat-theme notation of a kind of musical composition'. Fires Were Started reveals a very definite three movement structure, which helps to give it its classical shape.
The war had been a revelation to Jennings in that it showed him the real worth and strength of ordinary people. This comes through in his letters to his wife, Cicely, whom he had evacuated with their children to the United States. He wrote to her on October 20th, 1940, of the Blitz:
Some of the damage in London is pretty heart-breaking but what an effect it has had on the people! What warmth what courage! What determination! People sternly encouraging each other by explaining that when you hear a bomb whistle it means it has missed you! People in the north singing in public shelters: 'One man went to mow, went to mow a meadow'. WVS girls serving hot drinks to fire-fighters during raids explaining that really they are 'terribly afraid all the time' ... Everybody absolutely determined: secretly delighted with the privilege of holding up Hitler. Certain of beating him; a certainty which no amount of bombing can weaken, only strengthen. It was this indomitable spirit that Jennings celebrated and honoured in his films.
Fires Were Started brought together many of Jennings' preoccupations and gave visual form to his feelings about England and the English. It stressed the heroism of ordinary men and women in the Blitz, carefully characterising them as distinctive individuals. It placed them securely in their culture, with popular songs resonating through the action ('One man went to mow', 'Please don't talk about me when I'm gone', 'Out with my barrow and my moke all day', 'Ah, sweet mystery of life'). Their own actions are underscored by the heroic symphonic music of William Alwyn.
The film was the result of a proposal to make a feature-length film about the fire service. Besides paying tribute to their heroism, it would also serve to fulfil the demand that was being made for propaganda for teamwork.
As a memorandum from the Public Relations Committee of the Civil Defence put it:
The simple idea that we would like to see brought to life is that the action of the people of Great Britain today provides the finest example of teamwork the world has ever seen ... In time of war, we make the most of what we already possess and faith in the power derived from voluntary team work is immeasurably superior to that of a nation dragooned for war. But to make the most of our national genius and to mobilize quickly our inherent strength, we must through propaganda make the idea of teamwork more articulate, conscious and dynamic.
Jennings agreed to do it and set about gathering detailed accounts of fire-fighting from Liverpool and London, upon which he based his script. The script went through five drafts between October 1941 and January 1942 before a final, detailed scenario was completed. It can be seen in the Jennings papers in the British Film Institute. It was intended from the outset that one of the firemen would be killed, which was in line with the MoI's desire to stress the need for sacrifice in winning the war. This is important in the light of statements made about Jennings' method of work. William Sansom for instance stated that there was:
No script. A general scheme of course, which we did not know about. The film was shot both on and off the cuff. Dialogue was always made up on the spot--and of course the more germane for that--and Jennings collected detail of all kinds on the way, on the day, on the spot.
Ian Dalrymple said: 'There was never any script. That wasn't the way Humphrey worked'. Statements like this have led to the belief that Jennings' films were improvised. They were not. He was certainly ready to improvise where necessary. He would incorporate interesting details encountered during filming, like the penny-whistle blower who is introduced into the introductory sequences. He improvised the details of the sing-songs, though he had always intended that there should be one, and some dialogue improvisations were worked out with Fireman Fred Griffiths on the set But it is clear that the film was carefully scripted and structured before shooting began and even if Jennings kept the details in his head, they were thoroughly worked out.
Jennings selected real firemen from stations around London, seconded for the duration of filming. They were Leading Fireman Fred Griffiths, a cockney taxi driver who had joined the AFS before the war; Leading Fireman Philip Wilson-Dickson, previously in an advertising agency: Leading Fireman Loris Ray, a sculptor; Fireman T.P. Smith, a former waiter; Fireman John Barker, a Manchester businessman; Fireman Johnny Houghton and Commanding Officer George Gravett, a regular with the London Fire Brigade.
One of the officers in the control room is Ernest Lough, who as a prewar boy soprano had made a hit gramophone record singing 'Oh, for the wings of a dove'. The new man to the unit was played by the writer William Sansom, who drew on his firefighting experiences for a work of fiction, Fireman Flower (1944), and a factual account of the fire service, Westminster At War (1947), reissued in 1990 under the more resonant title The Blitz. In the volume he recalled the Blitz as 'a hotchpotch time of paradox, strain, pain, hard work, fidelity and often of laughter', all of which Jennings was to capture in his film.
The film was shot between February and October 1942, with facilities provided by the Ministry of Home Security, the Home Office and the National Fire Service. Exteriors were filmed on location with the fire specially staged in a warehouse at St Katherine's Dock and interiors taken at Pinewood Studios, headquarters of the Crown Film Unit. In a letter to his Cicely, dated April 12th, 1942, Jennings described the filming in Stepney and Wapping:
The place and the people illuminating beyond everything ... It has now become 14 hours a day, living in Stepney the whole time, really have never worked so hard at anything or I think thrown myself into anything so completely. Whatever the results it is definitely an advance in film-making for me--really beginning to understand people and making friends with them and not just looking at them and lecturing or pitying them. Another general effect of the war.
The film that resulted from all this activity, initially known as I Was a Fireman, although made in 1942, looks back to 1940 to recreate one night in the Blitz. The opening title explains that the film takes place before August 1941 when the unified National Fire Service was created by a merger of various independent brigades of regular and auxiliary firemen. The Auxiliary Fire Service had been set up as a branch of civil defence in 1938 and the firemen in the film wear AFS insignia. The film was to become one of the key works in creating the mythic image of the London Blitz. Those heroic figures silhouetted against the blazing inferno sweeping the dockside warehouse came to embody the epic of the ordinary men and women who calmly and courageously took up the defence of their city.
Jennings' film dramatises the experiences of Heavy Unit One, a single fire engine and its crew stationed at a dockland fire station. Like the rest of his work, it is carefully structured, falling into three distinct movements: the build-up, the fire, the aftermath. Unusually for him, he adopts a conventional linear narrative form. Within it, however, he inserts a number of typical Jennings images, all of them drawn from reality and observation. There is the one-legged man hobbling on crutches past the ruins, three large women wheeling a rickety pram through the confusion, a solitary tree in full blossom in the station yard, a graceful sailing barge gliding down the Thames, a barrage balloon floating majestically above the river. The river is a recurrent image, gliding serenely and timelessly on in peace and war. All these images are images of life continuing amid the crisis, but they also help to give the film the feel of the 'solidified dream-image' of the Surrealists.
The pace of the first section of the film is relaxed, centring on the depiction of routine. We are introduced to each of the crew of Heavy Unit One in turn, as the film cuts back and forth from them as distinctive individuals to the life of the streets and docks going on as usual--the picture of normality. The crew gathers at substation 14Y with a litany of 'good mornings': cheerful cockney taxi driver Johnny Daniels; jaunty tobacconist 'Jacko' with his permanent cigarette; Scottish intellectual Rumbold, nicknamed 'The Colonel'; chirpy B.A. Brown; pleasant Vallance and quiet Walters. They are introduced to a new man, advertising copywriter Bill Barrett, who is put in Johnny's hands to be shown the ropes. The fire engine is cleaned and over that scene we hear the voices of the girls in the control room receiving the routine daily reports on the state of the firefighting equipment and appliances, a device which has the effect of integrating the girls at headquarters with the work of the men on the ground. The crew go through their drill and then Johnny shows Barrett over their patch. The role of the newcomer has the effect of identifying the audience with the new man and explaining to them through him the functions of the Auxiliary Fire Service.
As night falls, they wait for the air raids to begin. The blackout is put up. The men chat and in the recreation room there is beer, snooker, darts and table-tennis. When Johnny discovers that Barrett can play the piano, he gets him to improvise a rumba and Johnny and B.A. do a comic Sand Dance until they are all sent off to get kitted up. As they return, Johnny gets Barrett to strike up with 'One man went to mow', which is taken up by each of the crew in turn as they come in. This is a conscious, but potent, artistic device to show the newcomer integrated into the group. The air raid siren sounds during the last verse of the song and with it the first movement of the film ends.
Events begin to move rapidly and the pace of the editing speeds up too. Guns and bombs are heard. Control begins to plot the locations of fires and order out appliances. Heavy Unit One is sent to a warehouse fire in Trinidad Street, which threatens a munitions ship moored nearby. Their fire-fighting is intercut with headquarters receiving and relaying information, a process which continues even when a falling bomb causes a shower of debris in the control room. The firewoman on the telephone simply dabs her cut forehead, apologises for the interruption and carries on. This has the effect of demonstrating the very real danger faced by all members of the service, whether on the ground or at headquarters. It also shows them all facing danger with the same dedication and composure.
To get a better angle of attack on the fire, Jacko, Rumbold and Sub Officer Dykes go up on to the roof and direct their hose into the heart of the blaze. Dykes is injured and has to be lowered to the ground. Jacko carries on alone, flames licking around his feet, until he is overcome and falls to his death amidst the blazing rubble. There is an enormous explosion from the warehouse, as if to signal the extent of the loss of a single heroic individual in the struggle. More appliances and hoses arrive from other forces and the fire is gradually subdued. Dawn breaks, the 'All Clear' sounds and the second movement ends.
The aftermath shows the results of the fire in the bleak, grey light of morning: smoke, rubble, water and men physically and mentally drained. Clearing up, Barrett finds Jacko's battered helmet. A mobile canteen arrives with the 'nice cup of tea', that distinctively British symbol of normality. The men are stood down. A workman coming on duty observes laconically 'Bad night'. 'Bad night', replies Johnny, 'You wanna go down the road. There's a boat down there, good as new. She ain't got a scratch on 'er, a sight for sore eyes'. That is the justification for their work.
But there is a price to be paid. The film ends with the funeral of Jacko, the coffin borne by his surviving comrades, the trees of the graveyard leafless. But the grief and formality give way to a sense of triumph as the scene dissolves to the prow of the munitions ship moving safely out to sea. The fire comes to symbolise the war itself, beaten by organisation, teamwork and individual sacrifice: the film itself, the distillation of the qualities of the People's War.
Fires Were Started, using real firemen, real locations and authentic episodes, was according to William Sansom literally true: As a practising fireman I could say this: the film was true to life in every respect. Not a false note--if you make the usual allowances for the absence of foul language which was in everybody's mouth all the time.
But it transcends the mere photographing of reality. Jennings' placing of his camera, staging of the action, tempo of the editing, do not merely record, they celebrate the men and their struggle. The crew are individually characterised by the consistent use of close-ups, while their activity shows them acting as a team, pitted against the elements--night, fire, water. With no sight of and little mention of the enemy, the fire becomes almost an abstract symbol of struggle, highlighting the qualities that the nation needs at its moment of supreme crisis.
During the war there was an unofficial distributors' rota under which the principal commercial distributors undertook in turn to handle the release of official films. It was the turn of General Film Distributors (GFD) to handle I Was a Fireman. But there was an immediate problem. GFD chiefs Arthur Jarratt and C.M. Woolf refused to take the film as it stood. They wanted a change of title and cuts in the first reel to speed it up. Jennings resisted, but eventually agreement was reached. Crown would cut the film from seventy-four minutes to sixty-five, and the title would be changed to Fires Were Started. In return GFD promised a West End opening on March 29th with general release on April 12th. Press reaction to Fires Were Started was almost uniformly ecstatic: 'inspiring and dramatic' (Daily Mirror); 'magnificent, stirring and often deeply moving' (Star); 'a vivid piece of British social wartime history that speaks for itself' (Daily Herald); 'a noble and convincing tribute to the firemen' (Daily Mail); 'Thrilling and admirably made' (News Chronicle); 'an impressive testament to the courage of a fine body of Spartans' (Manchester Guardian). It is the longer-version of the film which is now in circulation but it has retained the title of the shorter version Fires Were Started.
The stature of the film has steadily grown over the years. Lindsay Anderson summed up the general opinion when he declared: 'No other British film made during the war, documentary or feature, achieved such a continuous and poignant truthfulness or treated the subject of men at war with such a sense of its incidental glories and its essential tragedy'.
As for the firemen, there was another dimension to their story that was publicised even at the time. It was in 1941 that AFS member Michael Wassey published his highly critical Ordeal by fire, complaining bitterly of the lack of recognition of the AFS and their lack of parity with the regulars in pay, compensation, status, conditions and promotion opportunities.
But a year after Wassey's book, the AFS got their recognition and their tribute in Jennings' film, which inscribed for all time in the national record the courageous reality at the heart of the myth. During the war, 50,000 emergency calls were answered by London firemen 327 men and women of the London fire service were killed in action and over 3,000 injured. The crew of Heavy Unit One stood for all of them.
Joffrey Richards is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Lancaster and co-author with Anthony Adgate of Britain Can Take It (Edinburgh University Press, 1994).
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