BFI SILVER | 2nd Edition

Humphrey Jennings
Film-maker, Painter, Poet

Marie-Louise Jennings
gL SS
BFI SILVER

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HUMPHREY JENNINGS
An exhibition 29 May — 26 June 1982
Humphrey Jennings
Film-maker, Painter, Poet
2nd Edition

Edited by Marie-Louise Jennings

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This publication © British Film Institute 2014
First published by the British Film Institute in association with Riverside Studios 1982
Copyright © British Film Institute 1982, 2014
Chronology and Documents, Filmography, Bibliography and editorial arrangement
© Marie-Louise Jennings 2014

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Cover image: The Silent Village (Humphrey Jennings, 1943), Crown Film Unit
The paintings, drawings, photographs and collages by Humphrey Jennings reproduced with kind permission of
Marie-Louise and Charlotte Jennings; special thanks to Patricia Aske, Librarian at Pembroke College, Cambridge for
help accessing the papers of Humphrey Jennings.
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ISBN 978-1-84457-801-6 (pb)

ISBN 978-1-84457—-802-3 (hb)

(previous page) Lee Miller photograph used on the cover of the original 1982 exhibition
catalogue. Portrait © Lee Miller Archives, England 2014. All rights reserved. www.leemiller.co.uk
 Contents

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MARIE-LOUISE JENNINGS

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CHARLES MADGE

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KATHLEEN RAINE

Only Connect: Some Aspects of the Work of Humphrey Jennings ............... 87

LINDSAY ANDERSON

More Than a Shadow: Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister........... 101

DAI VAUGHAN

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 Foreword to the 2nd Edition
MARIE-LOUISE JENNINGS

Humphrey Jennings was born in 1907 in a house constructed by his father in the
remote seaside village of Walberswick, Suffolk. His parents — Frank, an architect,
and Mildred, a painter — were believers in guild socialism which took its ideals
from the work of John Ruskin and William Morris. They held that the devaluation
of the workman’s labour in a capitalist society could only be arrested by the
creation of small, self-governing groups of craftsmen. Mildred Jennings founded
such a workshop, the Walberswick Peasant Pottery Company which bought, made
and sold furniture, fabrics and pottery, much of it bought on the continent. They
read the radical magazine edited by A. R. Orage, The New Age, a bulletin for
socialist theories of culture. Like Orage himself, they, particularly Mildred
Jennings, became involved in the work of the mystics, Ouspensky and Gurdjieff.
Of his mother, Humphrey Jennings once said ‘My mother believes she carries the
keys of the world in her pocket.’ He believed this also: anyone could do anything.
Jennings was an only child for eight years until his brother Rodney was
born in 1915. His mother allowed him great freedom, playing alone on the
beach, running along the narrow groins sticking out over the sea. Much later
he wrote of his ‘wild lonely childhood’. Their lives were simple: no indoor
lavatory, no running water, no electricity. Food was often gathered from the
hedgerows. His father built timber and brick houses reconstructed from
ruined Tudor buildings which would otherwise have been burned.
Later he remembered the beach where horses training for the war were
ridden out to sea while guns were fired above them. He wrote later of his
childhood a prose poem which encapsulated the simple rural world in which
he grew up:
viii HUMPHREY JENNINGS

It was a time of artists and bicycles and blue and white spotty dresses.
They had a little boy who was carried in the basket of his mother’s bicycle and they used
to picnic on the common between Walberswick and Blythburgh.
In the summer the gorse on the Common bright yellow and a spark from the train as it
passed would set the dry bushes on fire.
How hot these flames of gorse, how hot even the day itself!
How cool the inside of Blythburgh Church — the shade of a great barn, from whose
rafters and king-posts the staring angels outspread wooden wings.
The solemnity of a child.
The intensity of the sea-bird. (1943)

Walberswick was a fishing village and Scottish girls came there every year to
gut the herring, singing in Gaelic. It was also popular with artists, including
Philip Wilson Steer and Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
In 1915, aged eight he was sent to the Perse School in Cambridge. The
Perse followed a different agenda to that of the conventional public schools.
The headteacher, Dr W. H. D. Rouse, was a classiscist and advocated radical
methods of teaching, especially languages. The boys learned Greek, Latin and
French through the “direct method’. This meant that from the start they spoke
the language during the lesson. As a result, my father could speak and read
classical languages fluently. He was also fluent in French, partly from spending
many summer holidays in France with this parents. English was taught
through drama: they were encouraged to write and act plays and the creation
and production of plays at school had a lifelong effect on Jennings. If, as he
said, he was lonely and bullied at school, this experience gave him strength. He
was never a joiner and his membership of groups, like the Surrealists and
Mass-Observation in later life, was short-lived.
In 1926 he went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, to read English
Literature and gained a starred first-class degree. All the time he was there he
also worked at the Cambridge Amateur Dramatic Theatre, acting and designing
sets and costumes. After he took his degree, he stayed on to do post-graduate
work (uncompleted) on Thomas Gray. Supervised by I. A. Richards, a fellow
student was William Empson who later wrote of him that ‘he was, though quite
unaffectedly, a leader.’ He was not interested in “mastering” people or
 FOREWORD

“possessing” them ... in fact he was rather unconscious of other people, except
as an audience’. This ability to lead a group without bullying them was
exceptionally important when, much later, he was working with groups of
people making documentary films. Both while he was an undergraduate and
afterwards he worked for the Cambridge Amateur Dramatic Theatre and, more
importantly, the Festival Theatre in the production and design of plays. In 1929,
in the middle of his finals, he designed a production of Honegger’s King David
for the Cambridge University Music Society, produced at the Guildhall, which
was reviewed by The Times as ‘extraordinarily successful’. His designs for
Purcell’s King Arthur, produced in 1928 by the Cambridge University Music
Society, were described as ‘original and beautiful’. From these romantic designs
he moved on to the modern. The Festival Theatre had been founded in
Cambridge by Terence Gray in 1926. Gray wanted to ‘sweep away the cobwebs
of external reality which were choking the theatre’. Jennings realised that
Gray’s approach to theatre was one that he wanted to follow. Unfortunately, as
with many of Gray’s colleagues, their relationship eventually foundered.
In 1929 he got married, but he and his new wife, Cicely Cooper, had no
money. Living in Cambridge they started an art gallery with the painter Julian
Trevelyan, but this did not prosper. In 1931 he spent three months on his own
in Paris, painting, but without money this could not last. In 1933 I was born
and within a year the family were in Blackheath, London, where he began
work for the General Post Office Film Unit.
Films about the Post Office were eclectic, and loosely tied to its real
work. The unit was founded by John Grierson, who had run the now defunct
Empire Marketing Board Film Unit. Grierson would disagree with the new
recruit to the unit on almost every point. Grierson was a son of the Scottish
clergy and saw documentary film as didactic: as a means of teaching the
public. My father saw his work quite differently. He wanted to look at and
reflect the world and lives of the people of Britain. When he joined the unit he
was much influenced by the Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti, who had
made films in Paris of daily life in its streets. Cavalcanti came initially to
England help the unit with their new sound camera and he stayed. He certainly
influenced Jennings and they became firm friends.
Initially, Jennings made films about locomotives; about the story of the
x HUMPHREY JENNINGS

wheel; and the delivery of a postcard. In 1936 he made, with the New Zealand
director Len Lye, a hand-drawn film not for the Post Office, The Birth of the
Robot. This was the year of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London
which he helped organise with Roland Penrose, Andre Breton and the poet
Paul Eluard, and in which he himself exhibited.
In 1937 he and others founded Mass-Observation to discover the
thoughts and feelings of people on Coronation Day, 12 May that year. In later
life, he would write an occasional ‘Day Report’ with short notes on what he
had seen, thought and heard that day. His poetry at that time began to be in
report form. The poem “The Funeral of a Nobleman’ is an example (see p 19).
In 1938 he did a series of radio broadcasts on the subject of poetry and
national life. Poetry, he said, enabled man to deal with himself: to protect and
arm himself. In one talk he quoted Apollinaire, who wrote that the poet must
stand with his back to the future which he could never see. From the past man
could discover who he was and how he had come to be.
The following year he went north to film for his first important film:
Spare Time (1939), made for the World’s Fair in New York. He had never been
to Salford, Manchester and Bolton before, and much later he described the
experience as the most important turning point of his life. As a country child he
was horrified at the way industrial workers had to live: the smoke, fog and dirt
that pervaded everything: ‘the desolation — the peculiar kind of human misery
... comes from the fact that it means work’ he wrote to his wife. And yet he
found that within these industrial wastes people survived by singing,
gardening, keeping pigeons and going to football and wrestling matches. The
film ends with the words, ‘Spare time is when we are most ourselves.’ Jennings
is now seen as part of the neo-romantic group which included the artists
Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious and the musicians Ralph Vaughan Williams
and Benjamin Britten who, in various ways, reflected life in Britain.
The war was declared later that year, and the GPO Film Unit changed
to the Crown Film Unit and came under the Ministry of Information. From a
rather rocky start, Jennings found himself making the kind of documentary
film he particularly disliked — didactic and dull. He told his wife that he was
‘thoroughly ashamed’ of the film Welfare of the Workers (1940). However, the
arrival of a new producer changed the atmosphere of the unit and his work.
 FOREWORD xi

Tan Dalrymple, a South African, had been the producer of feature films and
when he went to the Crown Film Unit he perceived Jennings’s vision and
encouraged him.
The three films he made under Ian Dalrymple were Words for Battle
(1941), Listen to Britain (1942) and Fires Were Started (1943). On the face of it
Words for Battle was a straight propaganda film, made to encourage the
United States to enter the war. But the images that accompanied the poetry and
prose read by Laurence Olivier were pure Jennings and far from the usual
propaganda. Using the words of Shakespeare, William Blake and Matthew
Arnold, accompanied by the music of Handel, it is romantic, touching and
tough. He later suggested that a film should be made of the work of German
writers of the Enlightenment, Goethe and Heine, with images showing the
terrible changes to that country, but this idea was never taken up.
Listen to Britain has no commentary, which was courageous at a time
when all documentary films and newsreels used a commentary to explain the
images to the viewer. Listen to Britain depends solely on image and sounds: the
noise of factories, ‘Music While You Work’, tanks rolling through a village,
children dancing at school and Myra Hess playing Mozart at the National
Gallery. What is notable about the film is the quality of the editing. Jennings
worked with Stewart McAllister, ‘Mac’, who had trained as a painter and had
been recruited by John Grierson into the GPO Film Unit. Mac and Jennings
had a partnership which veered between close comradeship and searing rows
about whether a shot should or should not be included. It was said that Jennings
would take a shot out while they were working and McAllister would later put
it back. Or vice versa. The credits have Jennings and McAllister on an equal
footing. The essay contributed here by Dai Vaughan captures both their
relationship and the contribution of McAllister to Jennings’s films.
Jennings’s next film was Fires Were Started, or, in some editions, / was a
Fireman. This was made in the London docks after the Blitz of 1940-1. It was
his first film that was near to a feature film except, to the dismay of the
distributors, it was too short to be shown as a feature film. Here Jennings’s
images, many quite unrelated to the story, come to the fore, as with the shots
of cherry blossom and the street flute player which begin the film; a calmness
before the battle. It is a straightforward narrative of a new recruit joining a
xil HUMPHREY JENNINGS

unit of fire-fighters based in an East End school. Fred, a former taxi driver,
shows the recruit around the district for which the unit is responsible. He
draws attention to the River Thames, which later proves vital to the story. The
blitz begins, and the rest of the unit are introduced as they enter the school hall
to the song ‘One Man Went to Mow’, played by the new recruit, who is
William Sansom, later a successful writer. The school bell rings and the men
leave for a fire in a large warehouse which threatens to blow up a ship full of
ammunition. The scenes of courage in the cobbled street, the danger of the
wall falling are shown against the people working in the control rooms who
are also under fire. A bomb falls and a girl covered in rubble talking on the
telephone apologises for the interruption. A man is killed and the fire is
eventually extinguished. People in the street attempt to resume their normal
lives, yet, as ever with Jennings’s films, there are small images that raise the
scene from the ordinary. Women pushing prams and a one-legged man
negotiate their way over the firehoses. The film ends with the funeral of
‘Jacko’, the dead fireman. As Lindsay Anderson writes in his essay here, the
‘sad little funeral is intercut against the ammunition ship moving off down the
river’. It is a story of bravery, sadness and success. Never mawkish: it is
always, as Kathleen Raine says, quoted by Anderson, ‘the expression ... of the
ever-growing spirit of man’.
His next film was also a narrative. In 1943 partisans shot Reinhard
Heydrich, the Gauleiter of Moravia and Bohemia. In revenge, the village of
Lidice was razed to the ground, its men shot and its women sent to a
concentration camp. The Czech government in exile in Britain wanted a film
to commemorate this terrible crime, and Jennings was commissioned. He was
advised to make it in the western valleys of Wales, beyond the Rhondda
valley. He happened to see a postcard of Cwmgiedd, a small village near the
mining town of Ystradgynlais. Attracted by the houses, the stream and the
wooded valley above, he and his team settled there for over six months. He
lived with a mining family and their life inspired great admiration in him. He
wrote of them to his wife: ‘Not merely honesty, culture, manners, practical
socialism, but real life: with passion and tenderness and comradeship.’ He
particularly admired the lives of the women of Cwmgiedd, caring for their
husbands, cooking for other families, cleaning and washing. His films
 FOREWORD xill

frequently portray the bravery and the work of women, as in Heart of Britain,
filmed partly in Coventry, and in the control room of Fires Were Started.
The Silent Village records a way of life that has completely disappeared
in modern Wales. It centres on the chapel, the pit, the school and a branch
meeting of the National Miners Union. Although there is a truck driving
through the village with a loudspeaker shouting ‘Achtung, Achtung’, the
Germans are never shown. The tragedy is in the execution of the men in the
schoolyard and the women and children taken away in a bus. But the film ends
by celebrating the undying memory of Cwmgiedd, ‘Lidice’.
While he was working on films he was also writing. Since 1936, when he
wrote a short article on the machine for the Surrealist journal London Bulletin,
he had been compiling what became his life’s work, Pandaemonium
1660-1886: The Coming of the Machine As Seen By Contemporary Observers.
This, as he says in his introduction, is ‘the imaginative history of the Industrial
Revolution ... This imaginative history does not consist of isolated images,
but each is in a particular place in an unrolling film.’ He had hoped to publish
it early in the war, when he had a contract from the publishers, Routledges, but
the text was not ready; indeed, during his lifetime it was never ready and
remained unpublished at his death.
He also continued to write poetry. In 1943, while working on The Silent
Village, he wrote on images of Wales in snow and a portrait of a miner, Dai
Dan Evans. He returned to Wales the following year and read sections of
Pandaemonium as part of a talk to miners on poetry and the Industrial
Revolution: ‘a golden opportunity’, he wrote to his wife. He had found
‘masses of new material but again no time, or very little’.
In 1943 he was involved in a film about the Royal Marines and the
invasion of Sicily, which came to nothing, and made a film about the history
of the popular wartime song ‘Lili Marlene’. In the autumn of 1944 he began
work on A Diary for Timothy, a film reflecting on the last eight months, as it
turned out, of the war. Beginning with the birth of a baby Timothy James
Jenkins on the fifth anniversary of the outbreak of war, it follows his first
months and the lives of an airman, a miner, a locomotive driver and a farmer.
The film looks forward to the future: the miner, who has been hurt in an
accident, says to his wife, “Will it be like that again, with flat carts for injured
Xiv HUMPHREY JENNINGS

spines?’ The film raises awkward questions: Beethoven, played by Myra Hess,
was a German. How do we reconcile his music with the horrors of the Third
Reich? Without question Diary for Timothy is a left-wing film. The BBC plays
the Soviet national anthem to celebrate the success of their army; children in
a choir sing, ‘we have learned all our Marx and our Lenin’ under a flag
celebrating the successes of the Soviet army. It was released late, after the
General Election of 1945, because it was thought to be associated with Labour
Party propaganda.
Post-war, he moved from the Crown Film Unit to Wessex Films, a
company run by his old friend Ian Dalrymple. He had plans to make a film of
Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd and a film about the Industrial
Revolution. Both of these projects came to nothing.
In early 1947 he travelled to Burma to reconnoitre a film to showmark
the country on the eve of independence. He stayed there for three months,
travelling up to the Shan States, on the border with China, along the coast and
inland up to Mandalay. He vividly described what he saw in letters to his wife
and took a series of superb black-and-white photographs. Burma, its colour,
life and religion, had a strong effect on him, going back to the spiritual life of
his parents. When he returned, he reported that a film of Burma could only be
made in colour, and colour film stock was expensive and unavailable.
Returning to England, he planned a film about the London Symphony
Orchestra at work, again never made. This orchestra appealed to him because
it elected its members and did not allow, as was the case with orchestras in the
early part of the century, substitutes to play at rehearsals. As ever the small
human images appealed to him. The small talk of the players on their daily
life, the casual way their clothes were worn; the shouts of workmen in the roof
of the Albert Hall during rehearsals while the music continued.
He was asked to make a film for the Festival of Britain. Family Portrait
(1951) returned to old themes: Britain at work and during its spare time. It
celebrates the advances in science and technology since the war. It was first
shown on the opening day of the Exhibition on the South Bank. He was not
present because he had died the previous year.
In early 1950 he was asked to make a film on health for the European
Economic Commission. Travelling via Switzerland and Italy, he arrived in
 FOREWORD XV

Athens in September. He had never been there before, and his reaction to the
light and the classical images that he had known so well from his days at the
Perse struck him forcibly. On Sunday, 24 September, he and an assistant
planned to visit a poet on an island off the Pireaus. They got on the wrong
boat and landed on another island, Poros, which they explored. Reaching for
a rock to clamber up, it came away in his hand and he fell. The injuries he
suffered were mortal and he died in a hospital in Poros, and is buried in the
First Cemetary in Athens. He was aged forty-three.
Interest in his work has grown over the years. The Hungarian director,
Robert Vas made a film, Heart of Britain (1970), on Jennings’s life. In 1982 an
exhibition was held at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London,
curated by Jenny Stein, who had been his cutter on Diary for Timothy. Here
were shown not just his paintings and drawings but also stills from his films
and extracts from his writing. Talks were given on Jennings and Surrealism by
his friends Roland Penrose and David Gascoyne, and on his films by Lindsay
Anderson. This book was originally published to accompany that exhibition.
Kevin Jackson and Kevin McDonald made The Man Who Listened to Britain
(2000) and Kevin Jackson wrote his biography, Humphrey Jennings, published
in 2004. In 2007, the village of Walberswick held a film festival in honour of
their notable son. Many of his films were shown and talks given. The hall was
packed.
In 1986, an edited edition of Pandaemonium was published. It has since
been published four times, the last in 2012 when it was used by Danny Boyle
for the first section of the opening of the Olympic Games. But these editions
were all a fraction of the whole and as such violated his original purpose of
compiling images which illuminated each other as they unfolded. A complete
edition of Pandaemonium, with illustrations as he originally intended, is to be
published by the Folio Society in 2016 and it is also hoped that a complete
edition of poetry will be published. His films are frequently shown at BFT
Southbank and on television. The British Film Institute has brought out The
Complete Humphrey Jennings Collection on dvd, making all his films available
for the first time.
Publisher’s Note (1982)

This book aims to illustrate the many facets of Humphrey Jennings’s career —
as film-maker, as photographer, as painter and as writer. It was originally
published to accompany the exhibition Humphrey Jennings: Film-Maker,
Painter, Poet held at Riverside Studios in 1982. Like the exhibition, it shows his
work in all media and attempts to illustrate its variety: while making a film he
was writing poetry; while painting he was also working on a film. His work is
infinitely variable and illuminating.

Films
Jennings’s films were almost all produced for sponsors. Up to 1940 he worked
mainly for the GPO Film Unit, which was put under the auspices of the
Ministry of Information early in the war and became the Crown Film Unit in
1941. The MOI was disbanded in 1946 and its surviving functions passed to the
Central Office of Information. Crown’s producer during the war, Ian
Dalrymple, left to form his own company, Wessex Films, and in the post-war
period Jennings worked on films for Wessex as well as for Crown, but the COI
remained the sponsor. Copyright on the pre-war films resides with the Post
Office, and on the wartime and post-war films with the COI, but distribution
prints of most of the major films are available from the BFI. The Post Office
and the Imperial War Museum also hold some distribution prints. 35mm
viewing copies are held in the National Film Archive and Imperial War
Museum collections. Many of the film stills in this book are taken direct from
the frame; the remainder are production stills. When production stills have
been used to illustrate the content of a film, this is indicated on the caption.
 PUBLISHER’S NOTE Xvli

Throughout the text the titles of films directed or co-directed by

Humphrey Jennings have been given in bold type: films by other directors (as
well as book titles, etc.) are in italic.

Paintings, Drawings, Photographs and Collages

Few of Humphrey Jennings’s paintings and drawings are in public collections.
Those illustrated here are in the vast majority drawn from the private
collection of Charlotte Jennings (Jennings & Daly collection) or from that of
Marie-Louise Jennings: these are captioned JD (with number) and ML]
respectively. Pictures from other collections are captioned with the full name
of the source. Only a few of Humphrey Jennings’s paintings and drawings are
signed, dated or titled by the artist. In such cases the caption gives the title in
italics and the date without brackets. In all other cases descriptive titles are
given (in roman type), with any conjectural information, such as dates, added
in square brackets [...]. With rare exceptions, photographs and collages cannot
be dated with any exactitude, but all (except for travel pictures) are probably
within the years 1934-39. Only dates that are reasonably exact and certain
have been supplied.

Acknowledgments for the 1st Edition

Special thanks are due to Charlotte Jennings for her help in dating and
identifying pictures, and her co-operation in making so many of them
available for reproduction; and to David Mellor for further advice.
Text permissions: the authors and Institute of Contemporary Arts for
reprint of ‘A Note on Images’ by Charles Madge and ‘Humphrey Jennings’ by
Kathleen Raine (1951); Lindsay Anderson and Sight and Sound, for ‘Only
Connect’ (1954); Times Newspapers Ltd, for reprint of review by Humphrey
Jennings in the Times Literary Supplement, 7 August 1948; the Humphrey
Jennings estate for writings by Humphrey Jennings: this arrangement
copyright © British Film Institute 1982.
Picture permissions and credits: stills from the National Film Archive
and Marie-Louise Jennings; thanks to the Imperial War Museum for the loan
of a print of Words for Battle (Crown Copyright/COI) and to the National
Film Archive for Spare Time (Copyright the Post Office), Listen to Britain
Xvili HUMPHREY JENNINGS

and Diary for Timothy (Crown Copyright/COD); framestills by Jane

Heywood and Roger Holman, enlargements by Geoff Goode Photographics;
paintings and drawings photographed by Ray Abbott.
The editor and publisher would also like to thank: Julie Lawson, Jenny
Stein, Elaine Burrows, Teddy Carrick, Ian Dalrymple, Nora Dawson and
Rachel Low.
Editorial co-ordination by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

Book designed by Richard Hollis

 Foreword to the Ist Edition

It is now more than thirty-one years since Humphrey Jennings died after a fall
on the rocks while exploring the coast of Poros for a new film and it is more
than thirty years since the ICA organised the first major exhibition of his work.
It is difficult to explain the lapse of time that has occurred before a second
exhibition should take place showing his paintings and other aspects of his
activities which include photographs, drawings, collages, films, poems and his
unfinished work Pandaemonium. Indeed the republication of the appreciations
written for the ICA catalogue by his friends Charles Madge and Kathleen Raine
make it clear that a genius of remarkable quality has been monstrously
neglected, and Lindsay Anderson reaffirms this in his expert critique of
Humphrey as ‘the only real poet of the British cinema’.
I met Humphrey first in 1935 when with other enthusiasts we were
planning the Surrealist exhibition that took place in London the following year.
I was at once captivated by his unusual brilliance, the originality of his thought,
his passion for exploration of the more obscure aspects of the arts, his erudition
and his intuitive love of his native country. Later as I became aware of his work
on his film Fires Were Started during the most harrowing days and nights of
the blitz I greatly admired his cool and indomitable courage. I can only add my
testimony that the assessment of his contribution to human thought and the
appreciation of the complex fascination of his character is in no way
exaggerated by his friends. They give authoritative accounts of the
‘imaginative truth’ that pervades every branch of Humphrey’s work.
I am convinced of the urgency there is to bring to light again the subtle
materialisations of his imagination and the perfection of his style.
Roland Penrose, 1982
Chronology and Documents

Note on Presentation
In making this selection from my father’s papers, I have tried first to give some
idea of where he was and on what he was working throughout his life.
Secondly, I have attempted to link up ideas and images which have appeared
and reappeared in his work. Thirdly, I have brought together material which,
as much as possible, reflects his thoughts and concerns during the production
of a particular piece of work.
Essays on my father’s life and work over the past thirty years have been
based on memories of colleagues and friends which, valuable though they are
(and that is why some of them have been republished here), nevertheless were
written often with little knowledge of what my father himself was thinking
about his work and in some cases there were factual inaccuracies. Again and
again friends have said that it has been impossible for them to convey his
presence and ideas because what marked him out was the way in which he
conveyed them, talking and arguing vigorously with those around him. One
feature of this selection is that it begins to show the energy with which his
thoughts were conveyed.
I have divided his life up into five sections which deal first with
childhood and his education in Cambridge; then Paris and painting; the GPO
Film Unit, surrealism and Mass Observation; the war and the war-time films;
and post-war work up to his death in 1950. I have selected from letters and
from work in progress from film scripts and treatments and notebooks and
poetry as I think that they show the development of his ideas between 1930
and 1950. Admirers of his films will find it helpful to look also at his paintings
and read his poetry. Last, the letters between 1940 and 1944 in particular are
important as reports on Britain at war.
I have made minimal spelling corrections and marked gaps in the
excerpts [...].
Marie-Louise Jennings, Hammersmith, 1981
 Family/Childhood/School/
Cambridge/ Marriage

1907 Frank Humphrey Sinkler Jennings was born on 19 August 1907 at The
Gazebo, Walberswick, Suffolk. His parents were Frank Jennings and
Mildred Jessie Hall. Frank Jennings was an architect and born in
Newmarket, Suffolk in 1877, the youngest of fourteen children. His father,
Thomas Jennings, trained racehorses, notably Gladiateur, known as the
Avenger of Waterloo, the first French horse to win the Derby, in 1865.
Mildred Jessie Hall was the daughter of a solicitor and born in Lewisham,
London in 1881. She was a talented painter and later ran a shop, first at
Walberswick and later in Holland Street, London, selling imported French
pottery and textiles.

With his parents (1908)

 FAMILY/CHILDHOOD/SCHOOL/CAMBRIDGE/MARRIAGE 3

Jennings went to the Perse School, Cambridge at that time under the 1916-26
headmastership of the redoubtable Dr W. H. Rouse. The Perse was noted
for its progressive teaching of English and drama, classics and modern
languages. Jennings took part in and designed scenery for a large number
of plays while at the Perse and later while an undergraduate at Pembroke
College.

He won a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge to read English, 1926

where his tutor was Aubrey Attwater, friend of Robert Graves during the
1914-1918 War. In March he designed the scenery and costumes for a
production of Thomas Heywood's The Fair Maid of Perth for the Marlowe
Society. He also designed sets for the Amateur Dramatic Club’s Christmas
revue and took part in sketches.

Jennings gained a First Class in Part | of the English Tripos and the Parkin 1927
Scholarship at Pembroke. He acted in a Cambridge Amateur Dramatic
Club production of At the Same Time by A. P. Herbert. In December he
designed the sets for a production at the Perse School and played a small
part and he designed scenery for Dennis Arundell’s production of Henry
Purcell’s King Arthur with enormous success.

Jennings designed The Soldier's Tale by Stravinsky for its first public 1928
performance in Britain with Lydia Lopokova and Michael Redgrave,
produced by Dennis Arundell and conducted by Boris Ord.
4 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

1929 In May he designed the scenery and costumes for a production of

Honegger’s King David produced by the Cambridge University Musical
Society — its first production as a dramatic pageant in Britain. In June he
gained Double First Honours in the English Tripos with a mark of
Distinction in Part Il. During this year he also designed costumes and
scenery for the London Opera Festival productions of Cupid and Psyche
and Dido and Aeneas. Some time early in the year he met Cicely Cooper,
the sister of Edward Cooper, a younger contemporary of his at the Perse.
Cicely Cooper was born in 1908, the daughter of Richard Synge
Cooper, a civil engineer who at his retirement was engineer for New Works
for the London Midland and Scottish Railway at Euston. Both her parents
were Anglo-lrish and she and her brothers were widely read and gifted in
languages. In October he and Cicely Cooper married at Kensington
Register Office. By then, Jennings had gained a bursary from the
Goldsmiths Company for postgraduate research, in addition to the
Foundress Scholarship from Pembroke, and began work on Thomas Gray.

1930 In March, Jennings designed the sets and costumes for The Bacchae of
Euripides produced by J. T. Sheppard. He edited Venus and Adonis from
the Quarto of 1593 for the Experiment Press and acted Bottom ina
production of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen which was produced by Dennis
Arundell in early 1931.
 FAMILY/CHILDHOOD/SCHOOL/CAMBRIDGE/MARRIAGE 5

Childhood
When I was a child, there was a curious relation of horses and trains at
Newmarket like this: My grandmother had a house up the Bury Road on the
way to the heath. If you slept in the front of the house you were woken up in
the morning by the sound of strings’ hooves going out to exercise and then
again, as they came back. Running along the bottom of the garden behind the
house was a railway cutting and on the left was a tunnel mouth where the trains
came out of Warren Hill. On the far side of the line there were long deserted
platforms — Warren Hill Station; only used on race days. Out of the mouth of
the tunnel there was a permanent lock of black smoke twisting upwards.
Beyond the Life of Man/unpublished n.d.

Blythburgh 1910
It was a time of artists and bicycles and blue and white spotty dresses.
They had a little boy who was carried in the basket of his mother’s bicycle and
they used to picnic on the common between Walberswick and Blythburgh.
In the summer the gorse on the Common bright yellow and a spark from the
train as it passed would set the dry bushes on fire.
How hot those flames of gorse, how hot even the day itself!
How cool the inside of Blythburgh Church — the shade of a great barn, from
whose rafters and king-posts the staring angels outspread wooden wings.
The solemnity of a child.
The intensity of the sea-bird.
1943

Blythburgh Church; (right) photograph by H. J.

6 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

War and Childhood

I remember as a child by the ferry watching the soldiers testing horses for
France. Farm-horses — chasing them naked down to the river while the men on
the banks hallooed and shot off guns in the air. I remember the Scots fisher
girls on Blackshore gutting the herring and singing in Gaelic. Scaly hands
running in fish-blood, the last vessel dropping her sail at the pier’s end, the last
fish kicking the net. But today there is nothing — nothing of the girls or the
boats or the nets or the songs or even the fishmarket itself. Utterly gone — only
the wind and broken glass and rough tiles made smooth by the sea. wary still
visions of bloodshot eyes brimming over with fear.
1943

To Walberswick
All the memorials of this part of the world, as far back as the written word
stretches, are reports of disaster — fire, flood, encroachments of the sea,
poverty, oppression, decline, war and the military, destruction of common
rights.
To the east is the sea. The sea-coast consist of sand-dunes, shingle,
clayey cliffs, which are continually eaten away by the waves at their base and
so slide into the main. Then the winds and the tides will silt up the river’s
mouth or break down the dykes and inundate the marshes and meadows and
farmsteads far inland with winters of great flood. Then storms at sea will cast
vessels on the banks of the Ness and batter them to pieces. Then fire will catch
the dry grass on the common and spread from roof to roof. Then the
townsfolk will come out on the marsh with billhooks and flails and defend the
commons against the Lord’s men.
Unwritten the story of the people’s resistance, uncelebrated in word
their struggle and labour. But the church towers from the past, the jetties and
piers, the mills and lighthouses, the farms and cottages, the roads and the
ridiculous railway — in whatever state they may be now — we must never forget
that they were made and built and created and tended by the people — not by
those powers for whom they were put up or whose names they bear or whose
money allowed them to call them theirs — into the actual making they had little
 FAMILY/CHILDHOOD/SCHOOL/CAMBRIDGE/MARRIAGE

or no part — it was the people and the people alone who had the knowledge and
strength and skill and love to fit the sails in the windmill, the thatch to the barn,
the wings to the wooden angels, the flashing reflector to the lighthouse lamp.
The range of the sea goes so many miles inland. [...]
1943

Cambridge
As we descended westward we saw the fen country covered with pity: the
water darkened with fish, the air screaming — the most brilliant prismatic
colours imaginable.
1941

King David
‘King David’ is beginning, as they say, to take shape — that means that we have
made long lists of scenes, scenery, colours for lights and costumes, entries and
exits etcetera. Now I am sorting old dresses and rolls of unused stuffs from
past shows. This goes on in cold draughty ‘rooms’ in John’s: everything deep
in dust — no fire. Nothing looks so tawdry as dresses off the stage. Mrs
Rootham shouts how many of each there are and what colours: I with
trembling fingers write on the back of an envelope odd remarks like ‘2 doz
Chinese pyjamas’ or ‘six fishermen’s jumpers in odd blues’. Then with some
of these under my arms, wrapped up to the neck I trail across cobbled courts
slippery with ice — the drift snow blowing playfully round corners — and back
to the warmth of home.
Here one sits up till 2 a.m. doing tentative sketches of odd characters in
pencil with dabs of poster colour and inks. Some of these look possible and are
taken next morning to Dennis Arundell who is usually in bed in a purple
dressing gown, with a typewriter on his bedspread & clouds of cigarette
smoke. He is giving lists of lights to somebody: and gives vague criticisms -
with an occasional ‘Yes I like that one’ — to the drawings which are finally
taken back to Mrs Rootham & the dress-makers begin. But that stage is not due
till March.
Letter to Cicely Cooper/15 February 1929
8 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

At the present moment I have something like fifty costumes to design — among
other things — in the next ten days or so: it is this film coming on top of “King
David’, a film of the Civil War 1642 with fights on the backstairs of
farmhouses, inns burnt down and escapes from haylofts: incidentally, how does
one give an estimate for an inn kitchen to be burnt in the film-studio? that is
the sort of thing I find myself suddenly asked.
Letter to Cicely Cooper/27 February 1929

Marlowe and Painting

You may remember Kathleen Raine and Hugh [Sykes Davies] were talking one
night about Marlowe’s “Dido Queen of Carthage’: I have been working on
Marlowe the last month or so and especially on Dido with the result that I want
to produce it sometime. This I talked to Hugh about [...] and also questioned
Robert Eddison about the ADC stage. The position is this: it is a rollicking play
with a relatively small cast, which can and should be played in front of a decor
simultané (very cheap this). As I am a member of the ADC I can produce a
show there for a much reduced rent and borrow their scenery lights etc. The
casting is pretty easy. Now what better than this as an Experiment contribution
to the Centenaire de Romantisme? There is no doubt that put on in the first half
of next term for three performances and really well advertised by Gerald
[Noxon] with Experiment names on the posters (John Davenport to play the
heavy lover) — production and decor (if I may) by H. J. with [J. M.] Keynes and
Manny [Forbes] and [George] Rylands really interested — we should more than
pay expenses ... Go and see the Delacroix exhibition at the Louvre ... Keep your
eye on works by Cossio, Ghika, Borés, Vines.
Letter to Julian Trevelyan/20 July 1930
 FAMILY/CHILDHOOD/SCHOOL/CAMBRIDGE/MARRIAGE 9

Humphrey Jennings, c.1933

 Teaching/Paris/
Cambridge/Films

1931 Until May, Jennings worked on his Gray thesis but lack of money made him
take a temporary teaching post at Bishop Wordsworth’s School, Salisbury,
whose headmaster was a former teacher at the Perse, F. C. Happold.
This job ended in July and in August he went to Paris to work on designs
for Cresta Silks. He returned in September and in October moved to:
19a British Grove, Hammersmith, London.

1932 Jennings seems to have been working on research work and painting,
based in Cambridge. In May he went to Paris and travelled to the south of
France. He and his wife stayed with Gerald and Betty Noxon in Provence
for some months late in that year.
At some point in late 1932 or early 1933 he and Cicely Jennings
moved into 7 Round Church Street, Cambridge.

1933 Throughout 1933, Jennings worked at the Festival Theatre, Cambridge,

painting and moving scenery. His eldest daughter was born in September
and in the autumn they moved to 28 Bateman Street, Cambridge. He got
testimonials from both Aubrey Attwater and |. A. Richards during June,
perhaps in an attempt to get an academic job, but without success.
 TEACHING/PARIS/CAMBRIDGE/FILMS 1

By June he had moved from Cambridge, although in the early part of the 1934
year he sent material from his work in progress on Thomas Gray to T. S.
Eliot at the Criterion. There is no record of when he started work with the
GPO Film Unit, but it can be assumed that it was by the middle of 1934.
By the end of the year he had edited The Story of the Wheel, and directed
Post Haste, produced by John Grierson, designed sets for Pett and Pott,
directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, and himself directed Locomotives. He also
played the part of an heroic telegraph boy in The Glorious Sixth of June,
directed by Cavalcanti. By the autumn he and his family were at 6 Brandrum
Road, Blackheath, near to the GPO studios.

Alberto Cavalcanti
12 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Degas
I einow writing in the Orangerie having walked round the exhibition one or
two turns. Evidently Degas is very different to our conception derived from
the usual pastels. His sculpture is here again: superb again I think it, and the
pictures are almost entirely of one class: oils (no pastels) and oils by Degas
with his eye on Ingres. You know the two great Ingres in London: M de
Nowins at the NG and the head of an officer tucked away at the Tate: Nearly
all the Degas here have something looking back to that side (portraitiste) of
Ingres esp Degas’ self portraits. Treatment of staring or dreaming eyes
especially, then the same eyes are given to his sitters and to washerwomen and
tramps. And in these pictures the paint has a parallel quality of thick
contemplativeness Ingres-like finish and luminosity: Degas’ staring and
dreaming az the picture. No cleverness, no shimmer of ballet dresses — but
thought — great thought. And in the colour too: black grey-blues indian reds:
saturated colours. [...] The sculpture I still feel to be different and greater:
because more direct: almost Indian in the rhythms of dancers, with no pastel
to weaken the outline or colour to fidget.
Letter to Cicely Jennings/17 August 1931/Paris

I write to enquire whether you know anything about cheap villas, Chambres
meublées or such like in Provence (St Trpoez — damn — or near it) for the
summer. Terribly cheap essential. Do you know anyone who owns one or
anything like that. How long are you going to be in Paris? I sit about and paint
and try not to lose my temper with this country and its ludicrous inhabitants.
[...] Very thrilled with Braque’s new work and a new drawing by Roux
reproduced in Cahiers [d'Art].
Letter to Julian Trevelyan/22 April 1933/London

The Marx Bros

I saw James [Reeves] yesterday and we went to the latest Marx Bros. film
which I had to admit was terribly funny: surrealism for the million. Also to an
excellent short at the Tatler with LL [Len Lye] and Jane, on Voodoo dances in
West Africa.
Letter to Cicely Jennings/n.d. (1934)
 TEACHING/PARIS/CAMBRIDGE/FILMS

Painters
How is ‘the world of the picture dealers’? And if I ever collected enough
bearable pictures do you know anyone who would take them? And so on. How
is Hayter [S. W. Hayter] he does not seem to have had his Exhibition here. I
am sorry I can’t send you a photo of anything of mine: they are rather more
like something now. In such time as I get to paint, I have been painting
scenery — not designing simply painting — at the Festival [Theatre], which is
however closing at the end of next term. Not enough to live on but something.
The University is ahem going Marxist and Life and Letters has got to
Jouhandeau and England is busy persuading itself for the seven millionth time
that it is beginning to face reality. We are rather snugly situated here, and
managing to let existing slide off our duck’s back. But of course there is
always the rent to pay. [...] The Auden’s and Day Lewis’s and so on are a
positive menace. Bill [Empson] is well out of it in Japan. And after Roux?
Anybody? Any poets? Hugnet and Hugnet and H. And then? Giacometti not
too bad.
Letter to Julian Trevelyan/15 March 1933

The GPO Film Unit

I don’t know where to begin. The job, to begin with, is perfectly real — I have
already begun work. [...] The hours are approximately 10 to 6 — or more like
10.30—6.30 — Half day Saturday: Sunday off. They are taking me seriously
enough - and are treating me as a ‘director’ at once! It now remains to get some
order into everything — to leave time for painting and so on.
Letter to Cicely Jennings/n.d. (1934)

I have just had such a day — learning to ‘cut’ film, reading scripts watching
projections in the theatre, visiting the new GPO studios at Blackheath (very
nice) — watching cameramen at work at the Wimpole St Sorting Office (a film
about lost letters — ) and so on. I am working immediately under Stuart
[Legg]’s eye and to some extent ‘with’ Cavalcanti which all seems promising
& certainly it is very exhilarating stuff. Also not particularly strenuous and the
people extremely pleasant.
Letter to Cicely Jennings/n.d. (1934)
 Film Surrealism/Mass Observation/
‘Spare Time’/The War

1935 Still working and living in Blackheath, Jennings directed with Len Lye, a
New Zealand film animator, The Birth of the Robot, an advertising film in
colour for Shell-Mex and BP. Jennings also appeared in Stuart Legg’s film
about the work of the BBC: BBC — The Voice of Britain. He contributed an
essay on the theatre to a book edited by Geoffrey Grigson, The Arts Today.
His second daughter was born in August.

Making The Birth of the Robot; Collage with dog/JD23

 FILM SURREALISM/MASS OBSERVATION/‘SPARE TIME’/THE WAR US)

From London Bulletin | June 1938 /

translation, E.L.T.Mesens

PROSE POEM
by
Humphrey Jennings

As the sun declined the snow at our feet reflected the most delicate peach-
blossom. as
As it sank the peaks to the right assumed more definite, darker and more {
gigantic forms.
‘The hat was over the forehead, the mouth and chin buried in the brown
velvet coliar of the greatcoat.
Ilooked at him wondering if my grandfather's
eyes had been like those.
While the luminary was vanishing the horizon glowed like copper from 2
smelting furnace.
When it had disappeared the ragged edges of the mist shone like the in-
equalities
of avolcano.
Down goes the window and out gotheold gentleman's head and shoul-

nor expect
to see. In some pictures I have recognised similar effects. Such
are The Fleeting Hues of Ice and The Fire which we fear to touch.
1937.

POEME EN PROSE Par Humenmey Jerancs

Lorsque le soleil déclina Janeige 3 nos Quandi eut disparu les bords de
pieds refiétait lesfleurs depécher lesplus sa alg lient comme ‘un
Lorqu’l se coucha les sommets 3 la ” Chom asbaesha aua Sipe ak
droite accuszient des formes plus définies. epaules, se penche Il reste ainsi pour—
plus sombres etplus gigantesques. Fimagine—quelque
neuf minutes.
Le chapeau était surlefroot, lebouche Jamiais jen'ai vu,jamais jeneverrai une
et le menton enfouis dans le col de velours telle splendeur, un tel chaos de r
brun du grand manteau. Je leregardai en clémentaires ctartificielies. Dans certaines
miinterrogeant si les yeux de mon grand- peimtures j'ai reconnu des effets similaires.
ier ae per Aare A ELE eal ee pee eae
Beye
arSige agmega
Soureeas.
no eee a4
juetion pare. |.tM) ;
From London Bulletin,5
8 June 1938, translation
by E. L. 'T. Mesens

Jennings was a member, together with Herbert Read, André Breton, 1936
Roland Penrose and others, of the Organising Committee of the
International Surrealist Exhibition which opened at the New Burlington
Galleries, London in June and ran for a month. He contributed to
Contemporary Poetry and Prose, edited by Roger Roughton, both his own
material (poems and prose ‘Reports’) and translated poems by Paul Eluard
and E. L. T. Mesens, describing himself at the time as someone who had
‘survived the Theatre and English Literature at Cambridge [and] is
connected with colour film direction and racehorses’.
In the autumn of 1936 Jennings, together with Stuart Legg, David
Gascoyne and Charles Madge discussed the need for an ‘anthropology of
our own people’ — a subject which had arisen out of the crisis over the
Simpson divorce and King Edward VIII’s impending abdication. This was
the genesis of Mass Observation.
16 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

1937 In January Jennings, Tom Harrisson, the anthropologist recently returned

from work in the New Hebrides, and Charles Madge, at that time a
journalist on the Daily Mirror, wrote to the New Statesman and Nation
setting out the aims of Mass Observation. In April Jennings wrote a Mass
Observer's report on himself and in September May 12th, the reports of
Mass Observers on Coronation Day, was published, edited by Jennings
and Charles Madge. In October he had a one man show of paintings at the
London Gallery, run by E. L. T. Mesens, and in December gave a talk on
Plagiarism in Poetry on the BBC.

Montage by Jennings of own Coronation Day photographs/MLJ

 FILM SURREALISM/MASS OBSERVATION/‘SPARE TIME’/THE WAR Ly

Jennings gave another talk, The Disappearance of Ghosts, on the radio in 1938
February and was commissioned by the BBC to work on a series on The
Poet and the Public, starting with talks on the nature of poetry and the
poet's relationship with his public and going on to discussions with poets:
C. Day Lewis, Herbert Read, Patience Strong. During the year he directed
two films for the GPO Film Unit: Penny Journey, tracing the journey of a
picture postcard, and Speaking from America.

Early in the year he moved to 19 St James’s Gardens, London W11 and 1939
from the end of March worked on location in the North of England on the
making of Spare Time (at that time provisionally titled British Workers), a
film which drew directly on his Mass Observation work, although he himself
had now moved on from Mass Observation itself.
In July he was on location in the Mediterranean making S.S. lonian
(or Her Last Trip) a film on a trip made by a Merchant Navy ship. In August
he returned to the GPO Film Unit and after the outbreak of war made The
First Days and Spring Offensive.
18 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Culture
There are still certain things in England that have just not been culturised:
examples beer ads; steam railways; Woolworths; clairvoyantes (the backs of
playing-cards having been adorned with ‘good’ patterns lately, someone
wanted the faces beautified also). When the life has been finally veneered out
of these it really will be the end.
H. J./Extract from The Arts Today/
edited by Geoffrey Grigson/Bodley Head/1935

REPORTS

The Oaks
The conditions for this race, the most important of the Classic races for three-
year-old fillies, were ideal, for the weather was fine and cool. About one
o’clock the Aurora again appeared over the hills in a south direction presenting
a brilliant mass of light. Once again Captain Allison made a perfect start, for
the field was sent away well for the first time that they approached the tapes. It
was always evident that the most attenuated light of the Aurora sensibly
dimmed the stars, like a thin veil drawn over them. We frequently listened for
any sound proceeding from this phenomenon, but never heard any.
1935

Racehorses (reproduced from London Bulletin); Racehorses (c. 1933)/JD394

 FILM SURREALISM/MASS OBSERVATION/‘SPARE TIME’/THE WAR

The Funeral of a Nobleman

This nobleman’s career may be likened to a wintry sun, which shines between
storms and sets suddenly in gloom.
The apartment in which he expired is distinguished by an awning in
front of the window.
It was a delightful sunny day. The enthusiasm was immense. At
Parkside the engines stopped to take water. Mr Huskisson having got down
from his carriage, the Duke beckoned him to his side and they were just
shaking hands when a cry went up from the horrified spectators who perceived
that the body was that of Lord Byron being carried to Newstead. Reason
never recovered from the hideous coincidence. The journey was completed
amidst a deluge of hostile rain and thunder, missiles being hurled at the coach
in which the Duke was riding.
From the tomb seawards may be seen Brighton afar off, Worthing
nearer, and closer in, in the valley, the village of Salvington.
H. J./from Contemporary Poetry and Prose/
edited by Roger Roughton/June 1936

Surrealism
To the real poet the front of the Bank of England may be as excellent a site for
the appearance of poetry as the depths of the sea. Note the careful distinction
made by Breton in his article [in Surrealism]: ‘Human psychism in its most
universal aspect has found in the Gothic castle and its accessories a point of
fixation so precise that it becomes essential to discover what would be the
equivalent for our own period’ (my italics — H. J.). He continues to say that
Surrealism has replaced the ‘coincidence’ for the ‘apparition’ and that we must
‘allow ourselves to be guided towards the unknown by this newest promise’.
Now that is talking; and to settle Surrealism down as Romanticism only is to
deny this promise. It is to cling to the apparition with its special ‘haunt’. It is
to look for ghosts only on the battlements, and on battlements only for ghosts.
‘Coincidences’ have the infinite freedom of appearing anywhere, anytime, to
anyone: in broad daylight to those whom we most despise in places we have
most loathed: not even to us at all: probably least to petty seekers after mystery
and poetry on deserted sea-shores and in misty junk-shops.
20 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

[...] But for the English to awaken from the sleep of selectivity what a
task. And to be already a ‘painter’, a ‘writer’, an ‘artist’, a ‘surrealist’ what a
handicap.
H. J./Review of Surrealism edited by Herbert Read,
in Contemporary Poetry and Prose/ December 1936

Photograph of own ‘Swiss Roll’ collage/JD33; Paintings in Room

photograph/JD16
 FILM SURREALISM/MASS OBSERVATION/‘SPARE TIME’/THE WAR 21

London in the 17th Century (1936)/JD10; Table Lyrique (1936)/JD200; E. L. T. Mesens, Roland
Penrose, André Breton andJennings at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London, 1936
22 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Mass Observation
Man is the last subject of scientific investigation. A century ago Darwin
focussed the camera of thought on to man asa sort of animal whose behaviour
and history would be explained by science. In 1847, Marx formulated a
scientific study of economic man. In 1865, Tylor defined the new science of
anthropology which was to be applied to the ‘primitive’ and the ‘savage’. In
1893, Freud and Breuer published their first paper on hysteria; they began to
drag into daylight the unconscious elements in individual ‘civilised’ man. But
neither anthropology nor psychology has yet become more than an instrument
in the hands of any individual, which he applies (according to his
individuality) to primitives and abnormals.
By 1936 chaos was such that the latent elements were crystallised into a
new compound. As so often happens, an idea was being worked out in many
separate brains. A letter in The New Statesman and Nation from Geoffrey
Pyke, arising out of the Simpson crisis, explicitly mentioned the need for an
‘anthropology of our own people’. A fortnight later a letter called attention to
a group centred in London for the purpose of developing a science of Mass
Observation, and this group effected contact with other individuals and with
a group working in industrial Lancashire, which had so far concentrated on
field work rather than formulation of theory. These interests are now united
in the first, necessarily tentative, efforts of Mass Observation.
Mass Observation develops out of anthropology, psychology, and the
sciences which study man — but it plans to work with a mass of observers.
Already we have fifty observers at work on two sample problems. We are
further working out a complete plan of campaign, which will be possible when
we have not fifty but 5,000 observers. The following are a few examples of
problems that will arise:

Behaviour of people at war memorials

Shouts and gestures of motorists
The aspidistra cult
Anthropology of football pools
Bathroom behaviour
Beards, armpits, eyebrows
 FILM SURREALISM/MASS OBSERVATION/‘SPARE TIME’/THE WAR. 23

Anti-semitism
Distribution, diffusion and significance of the dirty joke
Funerals and undertakers
Female taboos about eating
The private lives of midwives

[...] It does not set out in quest of truth or facts for their own sake, or for
the sake of an intellectual minority, but aims at exposing them in simple terms
to all observers, so that their environment may be understood and thus
constantly transformed. Whatever the political methods called upon to effect
the transformation, the knowledge of what has to be transformed is
indispensable. The foisting on the mass of ideals or ideas developed by men
apart from it, irrespective of its capacities, causes mass misery, intellectual
despair and an international shambles.
We hope shortly to produce a pamphlet outlining a programme of
action. We welcome criticism and co-operation.
Letter to the New Statesman and Nation
signed by Tom Harrisson, Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge/
30 January 1937

Photograph of allotments [Bolton?]/JD59; painting of allotments (1944—5)/JD20

HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Extract from a Report

April 12 was a reasonably normal day as my life is at present: it was typical of
existence for the last month or so. My health was normal; that is to say | was
not more tired headachey or irritable than usual. The weather depended
principally on varying densities of high cirrus clouds: thick and even in the
early morning, producing a dull foggy effect. Then thinner and more patchy
as the day increased until there was bright sun for ten-minute periods in the
afternoon. Rather more clouds again in the late afternoon when it was colder.
Dull evening but without fog or rain.
No definite dream remembered, but a half-waking thought of
something satisfactory (the contrary of waking up worried). Woke up earlier
or more easily than usual about 7.45. [...] Did teeth while bathwater was
running: put too much mouth wash into mug: have a tendency to do this as too
much produces a ‘kick’ like a neat spirit. [...] Remembered I should try to look
tidy as I had to deal with new typist first job this morning. Noticed Hardy’s
poems lying on floor of bedroom: had read some night before. Had brought
‘Daily Mirror’ in from hall on way back from bath; sat and read it half dressed
on edge of bed. [...] Met a strange man coming out of Ch.’s [Madge] as I went
in. Went round to back to let myself in. Crossing loggia noticed contrast of
bicycles, old boxes and rubbish with sunny garden seen through round-headed
arches. Nearly photographed one arch as I have experience that in
photographing from shadow through an arch into sunlight a curious optical
effect is produced ... Wandered into churchyard to take photo of tombs: as I
was using filter I had to wait a long time for really good sun. Shot no good in
the end because while waiting for sun I was afraid someone would come and
complain of my photographing in churchyard. Walked again. Arrived about
2.30. As I rang bell I thought ‘I suppose photography has to get more and more
realistic as one gets older.’ [...] At 4.30 Charles said I was coming at 5 and he
(Ch) wished to discuss with me scientific aspect of M.O. We walked over the
Heath ... We walked across grass to Greenwich park. Ch. good on Lenin and
table: I connected what he said about contemporary psychology with Nelson I
suppose from looking down on Royal Naval Hospital.
Report written by H. J./12 April 1937
FILM SURREALISM/MASS OBSERVATION/‘SPARE TIME’/THE WAR 25

THEY SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES

MASS OBSERVATION AND SOCIAL NARRATIVE
[The reports which are written for Mass Observation come largely
from people whose lives are spent in a world whose behaviour, language, and
viewpoint are far removed from academic science and literature. Sociologists
and realistic novelists—including proletarian novelists—find it difficult if not
impossible to describe the texture of this world. After reading hundreds of
Mass Observation reports, we find that they tend to cover just those aspects
of life which the others miss. Why is this? Because, we suggest, in these
reports people are speaking in a language natural to them—their spelling,
punctuation, etc., are their OWN—in spite of a uniform State education.
This ts hardly a “‘ well of English undefiled” since into it continually flow
more or less muddy streams from press, radio, advertising, film, and ‘‘ litera-
ture”. But in actual social usage, all the jungle of words grow up together
in Darwinian conflict until they establish their own ecology and functions.
Contrast this functional value with the use of words by sensitive, stylisi
writers. Each phrase is paralysed by fear of cliché. Yet each phrase must
have a class or family resemblance to one of the known accents of literature.
In reaction against this paralysis, there is a general wish among writers
to be UNLIKE the intellectual, LIKE the masses. Much “ proletarian fiction ”
is a product of this wish. But it is not enough for such fiction to be ABOUT
proletarians, if they in their turn become a romantic fiction, nor even for it
to be BY proletarians, if it is used by them as a means of escaping out of
the proletariat.
Mass Observation is among other things giving working-class and middle
class people a chance to speak for themselves, about themselves. How little
they are affected by the paralysis of language, even in their first attempts,
-_ be judged from the extracts from Mass Observation reports which
fo
C. M. and H. J.

Graveyard (negative print)/JD44

26 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Three American Poems

The hills are like the open downs of England — the peaceful herds upon the
grassy slopes, the broken sea-washed cliffs, the beach with ever-tumbling surf,
the wrecks that strew the shore in pitiful reminder, the crisp air from the sea,
the long superb stretch of blue waters—the Graveyard.

As we journey up the valley

Of the Connecticut
The swift thought of the locomotive
Recovers the old footprints.

Even in this desolate country, where neither trees nor verdure dressed, and, as
they supposed, of uninhabitable terror, like us above the birds, like us above
the fishes, like us above the insects, singing and dancing, a man.
1938

Poem, based on a book of photographs by Walker Evans

 FILM SURREALISM/MASS OBSERVATION/‘SPARE TIME’/THE WAR 27

Who Does That Remind You Of ?

‘Two or three years ago there seems to have been a plan for taking the glass off
the pictures in the National Gallery, so that you could see them instead of a
reflection of yourself. Also important as breaking down a barrier between the
public and the ‘sacredness’ of the images they are allowed to peer at. The glass
having in fact been taken off a Honthorst (a big Dutch picture) I asked the
attendant if they were seriously going to take the glass off all the pictures. He
said he certainly hoped not. Why? because he’d have a terrible time: ‘do you
know what they do? They come in here and put their hands over the mouth
and nose of a Rembrandt, and then say “Who does that remind you of?”.’
No doubt the appearance of Rembrandt in this kind of story (rather
than say Titian) is due to his connections with photography; — ‘Rembrandt
lighting’, sepia prints (in imitation of Rembrandt’s colouring), his etchings
(the photography of his time — exploited as competition with 19th century
photography by Whistler), the suburban photographer’s studio called
‘Rembrandt House’ (fact) — i.e. portrait photography (‘who does that remind
you of?’) etc. Then of late we have had Mr Laughton as Rembrandt
philosophically reading the Old Testament — before that as Ruggles as
Lincoln, and since as a beachcomber! — in fact it is clear that Rembrandt
(particularly in his pictures of ‘Philosophers’) was one of the first people to
exploit the ‘Old Curiosity Shop’ motif, and with it all the different ideas
coming under the heading of a ‘brown study’.
Photography itself — ‘photogenic drawing’ — began simply as the
mechanisation of realism, and it remains the system with which the people can
be pictured by the people for the people: simple to operate, results capable of
mass reproduction and circulation, effects generally considered truthful (‘the
camera cannot lie’) and so on. But intellectually the importance of the camera
lies clearly in the way in which it deals with problems of choice — choice and
avoidance of choice. Freud (Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Chapter 12)
says that the feeling of Déja Vu (‘Who does that remind you of?’)
‘corresponds to the memory of an unconscious fantasy’. The camera is
precisely an instrument for recording the object or image that prompted that
memory. Hence the rush to see ‘how they came out’.
28 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

In the same book Freud insists on the impossibility of a voluntarily

‘arbitrary’ choice or association of objects. Below is an unfinished (or
incomplete) chart of certain words and images (evidently a personal list) with
dotted-line indications of the relationships ordinarily assumed to exist
between them (between ‘sea’ and ‘blue’ for instance). Clearly it is a problem
just how far these ‘common sense’ relationships differ from or overlap the
relationships (between ‘prism’ and ‘fir tree’ for example) established in a
painting or dictated by ‘unconscious fantasy’.
From London Bulletin/ October 1938

The Origin ofColour (1937)/JD61; The Ongin ofColour (1937)/JD113; ‘Connectio

ns’
 FILM SURREALISM/MASS OBSERVATION/‘SPARE TIME’/THE WAR

Tableaux Parisiens
People going to look at a Rembrandt — what is there about a Rembrandt?
Choice of Images — Da vu: the images on this list related to the
phenomenon of déja vu in the sense in which Freud explains this phenomenon —
the image fulfilling the already existent fantasy. The relation of déd vu to
‘reincarnation’, ‘spirals in time’ and other such complexities is due to the
fantasy being related to a special scene or object — i.e. the actual scene is
imagined to have happened before. But the sensation of da vu before an image
or to a serial object (an object produced in series such as an apple, a rose, a
locomotive) precludes all idea of such rubbish. The use therefore of images
and serial objects is important as a debunking of idealism and furthers the cause
of materialism. Further confronted with an image (a photo or an engraving) a
far more detached analysis is possible than with a scene which in many cases is
only passed through (in a car or a train) and is in other ways unpossessable —
unavailable for detached analysis. But with an image the parts of the image
which correspond to the fantasy can be separated from those which do not.
Example: Some years ago (say 1930-1934) I bought in Cambridge a few
19th-century etchings in Paris: thinking vaguely that they reminded me of the
areas on the left bank (quai Voltaire etc) which were gradually being knocked
down — J never studied them in detail. To roughly the same period belongs a
detailed study of Baudelaire’s poems of which the sections named Tableaux
Parisiens have always particularly moved me, representing a nostalgia also for
Paris — and Le Cygne in particular. Reading poetry in Paris I connect with a cafe
on the right bank — where I first read Rimbaud — opposite the Place Voltaire —
facing the Louvre. Le Cygne makes a definite reference to the destruction of the
Place Carrousel (in 1848 and onwards) for the rebuilding of the Louvre:

Andromaque, je pense a vous! Ce petit fleuve,

Pauvre et triste miroir ot jadis resplendit
L’immense majesté de vos douleurs de veuve,
Ce Simois menteur qui par vos pleurs grandit,

A fécondé soudain ma mémoire fertile,

Comme je traversais le nouveau Carrousel.
Le vieux Paris n’est plus (la forme d’une ville
Change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d’un mortel).”
30 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Tableau parisien (1938-9)/JD108; Locomotive (c.1936)/Stuart

Lege
 FILM SURREALISM/MASS OBSERVATION/‘SPARE TIME’/THE WAR 3

Grove Farm
A derelict cart with dead grass entwined in its great wheels: plants and grasses
which had climbed in the springtime and been upheld by the spokes, flowered
in the summer and now died in October. The cart unmoved all the year
round — the wheels unmoved and unmoving — lit and unlit with the daily light
of the great sun ...
Autumn 1939

Moonlight *39
December 1939 — coming back from a Christmas dinner with Paule Vézelay,
in bright moonlight the meaningless architecture of Earl’s Court Road looks
like the facade of an Italian Palace. At midnight outside the Underground
station a barrel-organ playing the “Blue Danube’.

The Making of “Spare Time’

Then after Derby up into the Peak district — quite new to me — where the pubs
are painted like early Ben Nicholsons: coloured lettering LIKE THIS and the
edges of the houses in pink. And right up on the top of the hills lime works
blowing white dust on the moors: not unconnected with BN now. Mixture of
mist and hardness. Buxton looking very smug: and then the beginning of
Cotton at Stockport. Cotton seems to produce a desolation greater — more
extended — than any other industry. From Stockport it is really all streets
through Manchester, Bolton, Preston — almost to the sea at Blackpool — about
60 miles. The desolation — the peculiar kind of human misery which it
expresses comes I think from the fact that ‘Cotton’ simply means work:
Spinning what is produced or grown elsewhere in America or India. Coal and
Steel at least suggest something produced on the spot. At Manchester there
was a sort of thin wet sunlight which makes it look pathetic. It has a grim sort
of fantasy. And a certain dignity of its own from being connected with certain
events in history.
Letter to Cicely Jennings/21 March 1939
1S) nN HUMPHREY JENNINGS

oe,

aout 4
Caulder)

Spare Time is a film about working-class leisure. It was shot in South-East Lancashire
(mainly Manchester, Salford and Bolton), Sheffield and South Wales (mainly Pontypridd).
The soundtrack consists largely of music, much of it on screen. There is a little natural sound,
and a very sparse commentary (spoken by Laurie Lee):
 TEEEEE
EeTV = ae ee
AAAAsAsaastartrtty oor Ae ah hes nae
ie ae is
ma mf 8}
RTE

“This is a film about the way people send their spare time, people in three British industries —
steel, cotton and coal.’; ‘Between work and sleep comes the time we all call our own. What do
we do with it?’ [1]; ‘Steel: the three-shift system means that the steelworker’s spare time may
come in the morning, or in the afternoon’ [2—7];‘Cotton: the mills open at eight and close at
five; Saturday afternoons and Sundays are off.’ [8-11]; ‘And finally, coal.’ [12-15]; ‘As things
are, spare time is a time when we have a chance to do what we like, a chance to be most
ourselves.’ [16]
34 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

ROYAL VICTORIA STATION HOTEL

SHEFFIELD 4

TELEORAM® HOTEL SHEFFIELD

TELEPHONE 20051 (eines)

guy bat rol Morfued

Ws 6 # vyfo bat

poe vicToMa polte

This is a vast, hot crazy hotel — which stands right up above Sheffield and
certainly has the most wonderful views of factory chimneys and waste land
and railway lines — Railways — I see La Béte Humaine is coming to the Paris
Cinema in a day or two and is all about railways.
Letter to Cicely Jennings/13 April 1939

Bright sun & huge white clouds and patches of rain — with a rainbow and
circling pigeons. We also photographed men buying 6d postal orders for
football pools — they sell about 7,000 every Friday at the P.O. here.
Letter to Cicely Jennings/14 April 1939
The Blitz/‘Listen to Britain’/
‘Fires Were Started’/Lidice and Wales/
‘A Diary for ‘Timothy’

In the early part of 1940, Jennings worked on Spring Offensive, Welfare of 1940
the Workers and London Can Take It (with Harry Watt) — all films to
demonstrate Britain’s ability to survive during the blitz and, after the fall of
France, in Europe alone. London Can Take It was aimed specifically at the
Empire and American market. The GPO Film Unit was transferred to the
Ministry of Information and Cavalcanti left, to be replaced by lan Dalrymple.
After his family left for America in September, Jennings started work on
Heart of Britain - a complement to the city-based London Can Take It
about the country and towns of Britain during wartime.

Early in the year he began Words for Battle, working on location mainly in 1941
London and having moved out to lan Dalrymple’s house near Pinewood
during the blitz.

Opening shot of Words for Battle

36 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Words for Battle juxtaposed words and pictures to show what Britain was
fighting for. Jennings suggested that a film might be made showing how
Hitler had betrayed the German ideal expressed by Goethe and Heine but
this came to nothing. In February he broadcast on the French Service of
the BBC as part of a series on Pourquoi j’aime la France. By June he had
started on Listen to Britain, filming on location in London, Manchester,
Blackpool and the Lake District. In October, at the end of the work on
Listen to Britain, which he made jointly with Stewart McAllister, his editor,
he commenced writing the first treatment of a film on the work of the
National Fire Service — to become Fires Were Started.

1942 Location shooting on the Fire Service film began in February and continued
through to April. In June, the Germans massacred the citizens of the
mining village of Lidice, Czechoslovakia and it was suggested to the
Ministry of Information, possibly by the Czech government in exile, that a
film be made to commemorate the village, which had been totally
obliterated. In August, Jennings went to Wales to look for a suitable
location and settled on the mining village of Cwmgiedd, near
Ystradgynlais. By the beginning of September, Jennings and his unit had
moved into Cwmgiedd and were living with mining families, rather than ina
local hotel, and location shooting in Wales was completed by the end of
the year. His return to London coincided with a major row on a proposal to
cut Fires Were Started drastically, in order to conform with the demands of
the commercial distributors.
 THE BLITZ/‘LISTEN TO BRITAIN’/‘FIRES WERE STARTED’/
LIDICE AND WALES/‘A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY’ 37

From January to at least May, Jennings was involved in the editing of The 1943
Silent Village, the Lidice film. By June he had started on a treatment for a
possible film on a history of the Royal Marines — work which was
interrupted in July by a ‘special mission’ to film the invasion of Sicily.
Jennings seems to have been away for about six weeks — first filming
commando training in Scotland and then the invasion itself. On his return
his ideas about the Royal Marines film had radically changed and in the
event the film was never started. In October he had begun a film on the
popularity of a German song, Lili Marlene, which had been adopted by the
Eighth Army in the North African campaign, and by the end of December,
shooting of the Lili Marlene film had been completed. Also early in 1943 he
restarted work on a project for a book about the coming of the Machine,
using texts from English writers of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. He
signed a contract with George Routledge and Sons for a book entitled
Pandaemonium, the manuscript to be delivered in June. In the event the
manuscript was not delivered. Jennings kept adding to the material right
until his death. The unpublished manuscript was edited by Charles Madge
in 1958 with a view to finding a new publisher, but none was found.

German footage with Emmy Goering incorporated into The True Story of
Lili Marlene
38 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Outside 8 Regents Park Terrace

i (photograph by Charlotte
ee Se .. Jennings, c.1950)

1944 In January, Jennings moved into 8 Regents Park Terrace, Camden Town,
the house of Allen Hutt who had introduced him to the Welsh miners
during the filming of Silent Village. On and off, this was to be his home for
the next six years. During March he was seconded from the Crown Film
Unit to Two Cities, an independent production company, to do a treatment
and script for a film about London and New York. This secondment lasted
until May but failed to result in a film. In July he was filming on location in
the South of England on a film about the new flying bomb, the VI, the first
flying bomb having dropped on London in mid-June. In the autumn he
began location work on A Diary for Timothy, a film about Britain in what
were by now clearly the last months of the war in Europe, and a reflection
of how life would be in post-war years. His family returned from America in
November 1944.

1945 Jennings worked on A Diary for Timothy until about April. Germany fell in
May and he was asked to go to Germany to make a film about life there
after defeat and the work of the Military Government. He was on location
mainly in Hamburg during September and October.
 THE BLITZ/‘LISTEN TO BRITAIN’/‘FIRES WERE STARTED?/
LIDICE AND WALES/‘A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY’ 39

London, October 1940

[...] coming across Leicester Square just after the sirens there are two French
soldiers, talking. The three quarter moonface very bright with a few streaks of
cloud. A group of white faces outside Lyons looking up watching a great
balloon sailing into the sky. Then in the shadow a man with a street piano
fingering a prelude. The officers cross over. The guns begin to thud. The
balloon rises fast across the luminous clouds. The moon is bright enough to
cast long shadows. The piano begins to play ‘Land of Hope and Glory —
Mother of the Free’.

The Blitz, 1940

You left you remember on a Friday night in an alert as we now call them. The
next morning was quiet enough: very fine and bright, we were working at
Blackheath as usual — then quite suddenly at almost 4 in the afternoon the blitz
began: the studio of course right in the line of it. The boys of course were
terrific — saved the negative from an incendiary on the roof — went out all
night photographing the fires. [...] Well after that first burst of blitz they
decided some of our work could be done out of town and as Dalrymple had
come to take Cav’s place and I was pretty tired by the end of ten days of it —
he asked me to come down for the weekend. [...]
After the first fortnight we began to work on film-reporting of the blitz
and are now up to our eyes in it — first pic. ‘London Can Take It’ specially for
you in the States! I am in Liverpool just for a moment on a kind of ‘Spare
Time’ assignment. [...]
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 firefighters 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. [...]
Maybe by the time you get this one or two more 18th cent. churches will be
smashed up in London: some civilians killed: some personal loves and
treasures wrecked — but it means nothing; a curious kind of unselfishness is
developing which can stand all that and more. We have found ourselves on the
right side and on the right track at last!
Letter to Cicely Jennings/20 October 1940

London Can Take It

[...] which we (GPO) made for the Ministry that Harry [Watt] and self
directing — plus Jonah [Jones], Chick [Fowle] and McAllister cutting — plus of
course the terrific luck of using Quentin Reynolds’ commentary. [...] And the
war? well we feel we aren’t doing too badly: in fact there is a kind of secret
exultation. You know I have always said the war was a moral problem for the
English.
Letter to Cicely Jennings/3 November 1940

London Can Take It

Heart of Britain: 1940
Everything seems much as usual: we have had a few exciting nights in the
Midlands but not much else. The hills and valleys of the North are as quiet as
ever and the pubs and dance halls are fuller and brighter than before:
entertainment has moved North.
[...] Since writing the above there has been the grim attack on Coventry
which I am glad to say we were not in: we had left there a few days before. But
we have very many good friends there and I am at the moment on my way
there to find out how things really are. The voluntary workers there — canteen
girls and others — we had been photographing and had been out at night in the
canteen washing up mugs and making tea. A superb group of people: sweet
young kids and magnificent women: How are they?
Letter to Cicely Jennings/12 November 1940/Penrith

Heart of Britain
42 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Picture: The ‘Midi’ Symphony

Picture an English interior in the remotest village of Oxfordshire: a mother, a
married daughter, the mother of an evacuee, reading and knitting quietly after
dinner — the bombers going out from the neighbouring airfield while the radio
plays the pathetic music of Haydn. On the walls are portraits, photographs,
watercolours, of men — predominantly men — engineers and soldiers, going
back to the days of Robert Stephenson and the Crimea — little framed
fragments of regimental colours — photographs of railway bridges — men in
uniform and men as children.
How beautiful Haydn — what measure — what warmth of brass — what
tears of strings — what march of ensemble — what forgiveness. Children of the
grown-ups here listening and reading — children upstairs asleep. What_a
nostalgia the penultimate movement of the ‘Midi’ symphony. Outside in the
dark the corn ripens: it is the last day in July. The trumpets of Haydn call us.
The bombers are all gone. The sky is clear. The flutes in the last movement
thrill us. The ears of corn move for a moment. The knitting-needles click.
The trumpets return. The bombers are already over the white coast-line.
July—August 1940

Words for Battle

We follow Wavell in Libya, think a little more seriously of our gas-masks and
agree with the German radio that we are on the verge of historic something or
others: we also know that the other day an old lady of ninety-odd by herself
tore down the wall paper with her bare hands and put out a fire-bomb. That
children playing in the streets lie flat on their faces when they hear bombs
falling and then get up and go on playing — that people are singing Handel and
listening to Beethoven as never before.
Letter to Cicely Jennings/25 January 1941

Queer life: we were recording Handel’s Water Music (of all things) the other
night at the Queen’s Hall with the LPO — and the sound comes out from the
loudspeaker with the sound-truck in the street. Near the end of the session
there were ‘chandelier’ flares overhead — lighting up the sky — the music
echoing down the street: the planes booming and the particular air-raid sound:
 THE BLITZ/‘LISTEN TO BRITAIN’/‘FIRES WERE STARTED’/
LIDICE AND WALES/‘A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY’ 43

people kicking broken glass on the pavement.

[...] I have been accused of ‘going religious’ for putting the Hallelujah
Chorus at the end of “This is England’ [Words for Battle]. This of course from
Rotha and other of Grierson’s little boys who are still talking as loudly as
possible about ‘pure documentary’ and ‘realism’ and other such systems of
self-advertisement.
Letter to Cicely Jennings/March 1941

Words for Battle is divided into seven

sections, followed by a ‘coda’. Each section
consists of a sequence of related or
contrasting images, accompanied by a
commentary read by Laurence Olivier in
voiceover.

The texts used for the commentary are:

1. Camden’s Description ofBritain
2. Milton, Areopagitica
3. Blake, Jerusalem
4. Browning, Home-Thoughts, from the Sea
44 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

5. Kipling, The Beginnings

6. Churchill, Speech of 4 June 1940
7. Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
The coda [8] consists of a tracking shot, accompanied only by music (Handel’s “Water Music’).
The frames reproduced here are designed to illustrate the relation of sound to image, either
within a sequence [2, 3 and 6], across a cut [5], or over the duration of a single shot [7].
 THE BLITZ/‘LISTEN TO BRITAIN’/‘FIRES WERE STARTED’/
LIDICE AND WALES/‘A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY’ 45

London 1942
London has settled down to a big village-like existence. Most of the damage
demolished and cleared up. Endless allotments — beds of potatoes, onions and
lettuces in parks, in the new open spaces from bombing, tomatoes climbing up
ruins — trees and shrubs overgrowing evacuated and empty houses and
gardens; in some places shells of eighteenth century cottages with black
windows and Rousseau-like forest enveloping them, straying out over the
road — no railings — climbing in windows.
Elsewhere the utmost tidiness and care in lines of planting on AA
gunsites, aerodromes, fire stations. The parks and gardens open to all, all
railings gone. There is of course very widespread exasperation about the
Second Front — partly political but more unspoken impatience and shame — the
more so because the country realises that it has been working hard and
sacrificing. I should theoretically be very tired at the end of a picture but I
don’t think I do: I don’t think it’s work so much as war ... or maybe it’s
middle-age but I don’t feel middle-aged, on the contrary — younger than ever.
There is nothing so exhilarating as seeing even a few ideas one has long had
really coming into being on the screen.
Letter to Cicely Jennings/28 July 1942

Listen to Britain
[.-.] It is half-past nine — the children are already at school and the teacher is
calling out the orders to a PT class in the playground. Just over the school wall
a housewife is washing up the breakfast. The sound of the children comes in
through the window. She stops for a moment — looks across to the mantelpiece,
to a photo of a boy ina Glengarrie: a great wave of emotion sweeps over her —
the sound of the Pipes played not in the hills of Scotland, but in the sand dunes
of Syria, where her lad is away at the war. And then she comes back to the
washing up, and the kids in the playground go on with their P'T.
All over Britain, the morning’s work is now in full swing: and at 10.30
the BBC comes ‘Calling All Workers’, and in the factories all over the land
half-an-hour of ‘Music While You Work’ peps up production: the production
of the tools for finishing the job.
At half-past twelve, the clatter of typing in the Ministries and offices in
46 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

London lessens as the girls begin to break for lunch. And in the centre of the
City wartime Londoners are crowding up the steps of the National Gallery for
what has become one of the most popular creations of the War: the lunchtime
concerts. Inside, in one of the great galleries, where the visitor in peacetime
used to tip-toe and whisper and admire, now there sit a thousand Londoners,
in and out of uniform, who have come from homes and works and offices to
hear the music of Mozart. And sitting among them the Queen. The music is in
uniform too — played by the Central Band of the Royal Air Force.
After all the blitzes, London still remains a strong and noble and
beautiful city, and she is not being left in ruins. Facing St Paul’s, giant cranes
swing metal girders high up over the traffic, and in a thousand places inside its
huge circumference, London is being rebuilt in the sunlight.
Now the boom of the traffic is pierced by the shrill of fifes of the
Marines’ Band, and they in their turn are drowned by the tremendous rhythms
of industry: the screaming of the cold chisel, the pounding of the steam
hammer. And now in a factory canteen, the roar of working-men’s voices, and
the clatter of spoons and metal plates applaud the profoundest clowns in the
country: Flanagan & Allen, as the final music builds up, the afternoon shifts
put their backs into it, and the twenty-four hours of life in Britain that we have
just seen will have played their full part in The Tin Hat Concerto.
From a Treatment for Listen to Britain, entitled ‘The Tin Hat Concerto’/
August 1941

Listen to Britain
 THE BLITZ/‘LISTEN TO BRITAIN’/‘FIRES WERE STARTED’/
LIDICE AND WALES/‘A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY’ 47

Listen to Britain
48 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

‘Fires Were Started’

[...] in Stepney and Wapping on the Fire picture. We have more or less taken
over a small district, roped off streets, organised the locals and so on. It has
been exceptionally hard and tiring work ... supplies of all sorts very short.
But of course the place and the people illuminating beyond everything.
The river, the wharves and shipping, the bridge in Wapping Lane smelling
permanently of cinnamon, the remains of Chinatown, the Prospect of Whithy
and another wonderful pub called the Artichoke which is our field
Headquarters. Reconstruction of a fire in the docks.
A charming Fire-station at a school in the centre of Wellclose Square
which for all the world looks like Vermeer’s view of Delft. Ridiculous plaster
rococo cherubs on the front of a blitzed house, an old man who comes and
plays the flute superbly well on Fridays, Mr Miller who owns a chain of
antique shops and specialises in Crown Derby, Jock who runs the Sailors
Mission, Wapping Church mentioned in Pepys which we are using for a
fireman’s funeral. And the people themselves, firemen and others: T. P. Smith
ex-international banquet waiter — Fred Griffiths ex taxi-driver — Loris Rey ex
Glasgow School of Art — Sadie the girl at the Artichoke — Mr C at the
warehouse who upset a precious bottle of Soir de Paris all over the safe and

Detail from a group photograph during the making of Fires Were Started: (centre back)
Graham Wallace, two firemen; (middle row centre) Nora Dawson, Humphrey Jennings,
Stewart McAllister, C. Pennington-Richards: (middle centre) Sadie Cohen
 THE BLITZ/‘LISTEN TO BRITAIN’/‘FIRES WERE STARTED’/
LIDICE AND WALES/‘A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY’ 49

Fires Were Started

50 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

then insisted on drenching everybody’s hankies in it — and what the Sub-

Officer’s wife said when he came home smelling like that.
For the last two months we have been working at this down there for
twelve hours a day six days a week: we are now roughly half way through and
pretty exhausted: the results peculiar and very unlike anything I have had to
do with before: popular, exciting, funny — mixture of slapstick and macabre
blitz reconstruction. [...]
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.
... Painting etc. Iam afraid I haven’t touched for months now — but maybe
when this pic. is finished I shall get back to a little. Reading nothing. Life
concerned with a burning roof — smoke fire water — men’s faces and thoughts:
a tangle of hose, orders shouted in the dark — falling walls, brilliant
moonlight — dust, mud, tiredness until nobody is quite sure where the film ends
and the conditions of making it begin: a real fire could not be more tiring and
certainly less trouble. But what one learns at midnight with tired firemen ...
Letter to Cicely Jennings/12 April 1942

First View of Cwmgiedd/ August 1942

You get to Cwmgiedd by crossing over — out of the town, straggly houses and
so on — round the corner — you come to a coal canal — one of the old canals
that they used for getting the coal down to Swansea and Cardiff before the
railways came in and there was a bridge over the coal canal; and the coal canal
sort of cuts the village off from Ystradgynlais and from the rest of the country
and up in a little valley, there is the village of Cwmgiedd, with a little straight
street that goes up into the hill and on each side — charming, beautiful little
stone houses and down the middle, parallel to the street, is a mountain stream
that comes running down — with a little water in the summer as we saw it and
then as we got to know it in the autumn and the winter with floods coming
down when the snow is up on the Black Mountains. And half way up is a
 THE BLITZ/‘LISTEN TO BRITAIN’/‘FIRES WERE STARTED’/
LIDICE AND WALES/‘A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY’ on

grocer’s shop on the right — Tom Powell, Family Grocer, and on the left, a
beautiful white Methodist Chapel — the Chapel of Yorath — the name of the
original village. Because Cwmgiedd actually isn’t really a village name —
Cwmgiedd means the Valley of the turbulent river. It’s a very turbulent river
running down this valley and this extraordinarily beautiful group of cottages
and then the rest of the street going up — beyond the school and so on — up into
the farms and mountains, and way, away up into the woods at the top.
BBC talk by Jennings/26 May 1943

Making The Silent Village; Pithead (c.1943)/JD45

The Silent Village
I really never thought to live to see the honest Christian and Communist
principles daily acted on as a matter of course by a large number of British —
I won’t say English — people living together. Not merely honesty, culture,
manners, practical socialism, but real life: with passion and tenderness and
comradeship and heartiness all combined. From these people one can really
understand Cromwell’s New Model Army and the defenders of many places
at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The people are really Tolstoyan
figures — or it is a place where Turgenev’s Lear of the Steppes could have taken
place. We are photographing them as honestly as possible — neither like How
Green — too theatrical, or The Grapes of Wrath — too poverty-stricken.
Letter to Cicely Jennings/10 September 1942

Absolutely non-stop for nearly three months. On this I feel at least that we
have really begun to get close to the men — not just as individuals — but also as

The Silent Village

a class — with an understanding between us: so they don’t feel we are just
photographing them as curios or wild animals or ‘just for propaganda’. As you
probably have seen, a large number of people — especially archbishops and
bankers — have started telling us what the country and even the world is to be
like after the war — and many of their suggestions surprisingly ‘left’ or
‘socialistic’ at first glance, but all equally sure that private profit must stay -
nationalisation must be avoided and so on. One can only hope that the people
will not be bamboozled the ninetieth time.
Here at this moment — How different and yet also a part with a central
motif of its own: a brilliant afternoon — the wind blowing long low black and
white clouds over the hills (the Black Mountains) the white smoke and steam
from Tireni pit and the steelworks down the valley streaming across with
them. Strong clean winter sun on the washing in hundreds of backgardens —
the chapel standing up white and looking newly washed — the men in blue with
white silk scarves and brown shiny shoes squatting on street corners — three

The Silent Village

54 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

lads home ‘dirty’ from the morning shift almost lying on the pavement waiting
for the Neath Bus. The Children in red woollen hoods coming out of school
and walking some of them far up into the hills to little pink-washed farms and
lonely cottages. A horse in a front garden. Three geese at the top end of the
village. The blacksmith’s baby girl with no front teeth — who says “Hullo
Jennings’ very aggressively. Dave [Hopkins, in whose house he was living]
now back and bathed (he comes home dirty and pops straight into his bath)
lying half asleep in front of an anthracite fire. To-night before turning in Mrs
Hopkins will roll back the mat and put out his boots and working clothes
before the same fire banked up with cinders — so that they shall be warm to put
on at 6 to-morrow morning ... In the meantime take Mrs Hopkins as an
average worker today: she is doing no official war-work — the things you see
in newsreels and Mrs Miniver — all she does is this: she gets up at 6 to see her
man off to work — his breakfast and collier’s box and so on — then she gets me
up at 8 — then she has her own breakfast and begins shopping and cooking for
herself and at least two other families — for Jack’s family because he has
silicosis and his wife works in munitions — for her brother Len — because he
works in the Seven (Seven Sisters Pit) and his wife is in rooms — then her
sister-in-law Nan comes home from night shift from munitions and wants bath
food and sleep. Then lunch for me. Then after lunch Dave comes home —
wants bath food and sleep. Then tea for all of us. Then Mary comes in to cook
and wash here. Then Nan gets up and is off to night shift at 8 (two hours
journey there — two hours back — ten hour shift). Then supper and she gets to
bed at 11. Fortunately they have no children — some people are doing this with
four or five children and or evacuees!
[..-] In the dark streets now the children are skipping with ropes made of
knotted colour rag and calling down the hill. At the bottom of the hill runs the
river Giedd over huge stones and talks all night. Inside the kettle is singing and
Dave and Mrs are playing cards —a peculiar game whose score is written down
on the back of Co-op order forms. Nan is making up her sandwiches for to-
night’s shift. On the mantlepiece two enormous china dogs stare out at
nothing — permanently warm from the tremendous anthracite blaze below
them.
Letter to Cicely Jennings/14 November 1942
 THE BLITZ/‘LISTEN TO BRITAIN’/‘FIRES WERE STARTED’/
LIDICE AND WALES/‘A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY’ 55

Wales in Snow
Have you seen Wales in Snow?
I don’t mean on the hills or farms or photographs of Snowdon.
I mean on Dowlais Top and the Merthyr Road
I mean the shift that went down in starlight and worked in the dark and came
up in the pale fleece of the afternoon.
I mean this man with thumbs in his belt and his old mac blowing — with the
black earth on his face and the white sky on his boots — with only his teeth and
eyes whiter than Wales in snow.
1943

Cutting ‘Fires Were Started’

All sorts of people — official and otherwise — who apparently had not had the
courage to speak out before suddenly discovered that that was what they had
thought all along, that the picture was much too long and much too slow and
that really instead of being the finest picture we had produced (which was the
general opinion till then) it was a hopeless muddle which could only be ‘saved’
by being cut right down and so on.
Well of course one expects that from spineless well-known modern
novelists and poets who have somehow got into the propaganda business —
who have no technical knowledge and no sense of solidarity or moral courage.
But worse — the opinion of people at Pinewood began to change. All this
arising out of the criticism of one or two people in Wardour Street — who had
other irons in the fire anyway and who fight every inch against us trespassing
on what they pretend is their field. In the meantime Lejeune of The Observer
had seen it and said it was easily the finest documentary ever made and that to
touch it would be like cutting up Beethoven!
Letter to Cicely Jennings/18 November 1942
56 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Pandaemonium
I have got out again [...] the material assembled years back on the Industrial
Revolution and [have been] asked to go down to the Swansea valley and give
a series of talks to the miners on poetry and the Industrial Revolution which
really is a golden opportunity — so doing some work on that I have got as far
once again of thinking of it as a book and looking for a publisher and so.
Masses of new material — but again no time or very little ...
Letter to Cicely Jennings/24 January 1943

Invasion of Sicily, July 1943

Away in the wilds first living with a Commando unit, and then going out in
convoy, the Mediterranean sun (surprisingly one felt) just as it always was,
then watching the landings — the first at night and then by day, and then
returning again by sea, via Algiers and Oran and Gib. [...] Very exciting really,
and prodigiously skilful — really and truly thousands of ships coming up
through the narrows to the Sicilian coast — keeping their time and station to a
matter of minutes — watching even the moon set just before the landing craft
were dropped!
The chaps themselves were really tremendous. Young and on their
toes — not at all the popular conception of Commandos as rough-necks. The
officers principally ex-intellectuals — a landscape painter, a writer, a man with
the Oxford Book in his pocket — chaps extraordinarily like the old GPO boys.
[...] We did some pretty good shooting I think — but as ever the most exciting
and moving stuff quite unphotographable — as the night landing itself (very
dangerous as it had been blowing a gale all day and the sea was swamping
landing-craft) as the last night in port — the chaps singing ‘Goodbye ladies’
and — astonishingly enough — ‘Who killed Cock Robin’ and a miraculous little
song beginning ‘Ohhh! the little humming bird ...’ Then the church parade
held simultaneously by the whole convoy — including lessons from
Revelations — the vision of the White Horse.
Letter to Cicely Jennings/3 September 1943
 THE BLITZ/‘LISTEN TO BRITAIN’/‘FIRES WERE STARTED’/
LIDICE AND WALES/‘A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY’ 7

After Stalingrad
We took a packet of bombing in London once upon a time — but as the end of
the four years we are extraordinarily lucky — compared to anywhere in Europe
itself. What happens in German (and Italian) cities I do not like to imagine. I
suppose we shall sort it out sometime. Do not, dearest, in the next year as
things get confused and rougher, forget me or let me get further away: the
confidence we have got must be there when the fighting stops — sententious as
that may sound. No, but I say that because England has you will find, changed
a great deal: not so much any one person is different but the young coming up
are pretty determined — and people in general if they have the same character
have had a good think. The man and woman in the particular job — the
ploughman and the coal-cutter and the commando are very definite as to what
was wrong five years ago. The present resilience of Russia — the sheer
performance — from Stalingrad to Kharkov and beyond has had an effect I
think even greater on us than the original heroic resistance and scorched earth.
We ourselves were good at taking a beating. But with all due respect to our
great 8th Army — the dazzling Russian advances of this summer: done by mere
sheer military means — invoking neither winter, nor mud nor snow nor heat
nor terrain nor poor allies nor internal collapse — but by the art of war — this
has really opened our mouths. I do not think it has been sufficiently
appreciated publicly - but in our hearts we know now that not only have the
Russians saved us from the Nazis, but also that they are beating them for us all.
I hope and trust we shall not forget.
Letter to Cicely Jennings/3 September 1943

I Saw Harlequin
I saw Harlequin dancing by the factory chimneys
Lay your head low on my arm love
And his name was Chartism
Close your eyes and rest
I saw Harlequin stepping through the machine-shops
Hold your breath and wait
I saw Harlequin peeping in the fox-holes of Rhackoy
Hold your hand tight in mine
58 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

And his name was the Russian guerilla

Open your eyes and watch
I saw Harlequin marching to the Curzon Line
Raise your head high in the light love
And his name was the Red Army
Open your eyes and cry
I saw Harlequin waltzing in the cornfields
Lay your head low on my arm love
And his name was the true people
Close your eyes and dream
1943

“Two Cities’
There is a subject for a film to be made by Two Cities which, to my surprise,
seems to have escaped everybody, a film of the two cities themselves —
London and New York — living simultaneously through twenty-four hours.
There have been quite a number of films made about the life of a single
city. They have usually been vivid, symphonic or generalised studies, but
there is no doubt that it was found difficult to get drama into them without
bringing in a story in an unnatural way. But to make a film about two cities and
give each of these cities its representative (its ambassador, so to speak) in the
other one, and any human story that you like to play around each of these
characters will appear perfectly natural. [...]
It would be a picture of propaganda for humanity. Remember that we
love people not only for their likeness to us but also for their differences. [...]
Do not mistake this paper. What I have suggested here is an idea only,
with suggestions for background for the story. A month’s work with an
American writer will bring to the foreground the four main characters and
their adventures. These however must be related to the background and grow
out of everyday life. People have often asked for the fusion of the realistic
school of film-making with the fictional. Here it is. A small group of actors in
the foreground and the vast double canvas of the two great cities beyond
them.
Idea for an Anglo-American film ‘Two Cities’/13 January 1944
 THE BLITZ/‘LISTEN TO BRITAIN’/‘FIRES WERE STARTED’/
LIDICE AND WALES/‘A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY’ 39

London 1944
The invasion was I think taken here with ‘customary British phlegm’ ... but I
must say the BBC seems to be doing a first class job. As for the Jerries — either
the All-Highest has something very special under his trenchcoat or they just
can’t make it ... have been working hard at my book and also a little painting
... it has become clearer (the painting I mean) less tricky I think but not yet
being 40 I suppose I can’t be considered to have begun ... [...] The Academy
[Cinema] is open again (after being Blitzed early on) and runs excellent old-
type programmes—such as Les Bas Fonds (Jean Gabin) and Kline’s Forgotten
Village ... the mind turns more and more I think to the old simple cinema we
loved together.
Letter to Cicely Jennings/9 June 1944

Bedford Square, 5 July 1944

As the syrens were sounding
The children were singing
‘Run along little Tishy run along’
As the syrens were sounding
The eyes were brimming
And by the Square railings
A woman was walking
In black cloak and black bonnet
And black scarf waving
As the syrens were sounding
As the eyes were brimming
And the children laughing
‘Run along little Tishy run along’
60 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Jennings rehearsing Myra Hess in A Diary for Timothy; A Diary for Timothy
 THE BLITZ/‘LISTEN TO BRITAIN’/‘FIRES WERE STARTED’/
LIDICE AND WALES/‘A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY’ 61

Notes for ‘Diary for Timothy’

Dark waves fill the screen: the sea before dawn
On the wall the BBC signal light flashes
The face of Frederick Allen turns to the microphone: ‘Good morning
everybody — this is the seven o’clock news for Sunday September 3rd read by
Frederick Allen — The fifth anniversary of our entry into the war sees the
Germans retreating in the South, the East and the West ...’
Big Ben in silhouette
The first flare of the sun on the Thames
The shining face of the Sphinx in the Embankment listening also as Allen’s
voice continues —
Now the voice spreads out over the country this bright September morning
— along trim little streets
— among V1 wreckage
— out across the fen levels where the wind ruffles the water, past the cathedral
towers, the turning windmill
the new pumping station
to be drowned by the roar of Forts and Lancasters wheeling overhead.

As people are going to church the hands of Big Ben touch eleven o’clock — the
exact anniversary hour.
Do you remember that same moment — from the same Big Ben — on Sunday
September 3rd 1939: ‘I am speaking to you from No 10 Downing Street ... this
country is at war with Germany ... for it is evil things we are fighting against
... but in the end I am certain the right will prevail ...’
and today challenging the tired voice from the past comes the wail of the new-
born babe — as the camera swings across the row of cots to the pillow of
TIMOTHY JAMES JENKINS, the hero of our picture, born today
September 3rd, 1944.
On her pillow Tim’s mother lies dreaming. Father an RAMC sergeant out in
West Africa.

Tim opens his eyes and thinks — of the work & worry, of the grandeur &
beauty of the world he knows as yet nothing —
Of the roar of town traffic and the clamour of country markets — nothing —
Of that good soul filling her buckets at the pump and that farmer fretting over
his harvest — nothing
Nothing of history either:
Of the American invasion of Britain
Of that convoy leaving for the Far East
Of the newsreels of the liberation of Paris
Of the latest Hamlet questioning the First Gravedigger:
“Why was he sent to England?’ “Why because he was mad ...
Of the milk-bar rumours of V2: “Tom says it’s a kind of
flying refrigerator — come down and freeze everybody ...’
Of all this, nothing.
A Diary for Timothy
He has never tasted the blackout or seen the Londoners sheltering from V1 in
the Tubes.

But all this is the world which he inherits: whose people — whether they know
it or not — are working for him — helpless as he lies in the cot:
the airman, peering through the perspex windscreen
the engine driver leaning out of his cab
the farmer looking over the years accounts
the actor holding up Yorick’s skull: ‘I knew him, Horatio ...
a fellow of infinite jest ...’
The miner combing the coal dust out of his hair.

Tim will have his individual place in the world, as they have. What is it to be?
Notebook on ‘Diary for Timothy’ /1944

A Diary for Timothy

64 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Germany 1945/‘A Defeated People’

At lunchtime today we were photographing a family cooking their lunch on
campfires in dixies on the blitzed main stair-case of the Palace of Justice at
Cologne — one of the few buildings still standing in the centre of the city —
outside apparently deserted - surrounded by miles of rubble and weed-covered
craters — but inside voices cries of children and the smell of drifting wood-
smoke — of burnt paper — the sound of people smashing up doors and windows
to light fires in the corridors — the smoke itself drifting into side rooms still
littered with legal documents — finally adding to the blue haze in front of the
cathedral. The cathedral now with all the damage round immensely tall —a vast
blue and unsafe spirit ready to crumble upon the tiny black figures in the street
below — permanent figures: Cologne’s Black Market ... and then returning to
Dusseldorf — much less knocked about — blitzed but not actually destroyed like
Cologne and Essen and Aachen — still a beautiful city, returning here to tea we
meeting sailing through the park-like streets a mass of white-Sunday-frocked
German school children standing tightly together on an Army truck and
singing at the tops of their voices as they are rushed through the streets
(where?) ... In Essen they still fetch their water from stand-pipes and firehose
in the streets and the sewers rush roaring and stinking open to the eye and the
nose — seep into blitzed houses into cellars where people still live. Look down a
deserted street which has a winding path only trodden in the rubble — above the
shapes of windows and balconies lean and threaten — below by the front-door
now choked with bricks you will see scrawled in chalk ‘IM KELLER
WOHNEN: ...’ and the names of the families who have taken over the
underground passages where there is no light (or once I saw one bulb crawling
with bees - they too must live through this winter in Essen) no water — no gas —
a ray of daylight from the pavement level airhole. [...]
Once no doubt Germany was a beautiful country and still remembers it
on summer evenings in the country. For the people themselves they are willing
enough or servile enough or friendly enough according to your philosophy of
History and the German problem. They certainly don’t behave guilty or
beaten. They have their old fatalism to fall back on: ‘Kaput’ says the
housewife finding the street water pipe not working ... and then looks down
the street and says ‘Kaput ... alles ist kaput.’
 THE BLITZ/‘LISTEN TO BRITAIN’/‘FIRES WERE STARTED’/
LIDICE AND WALES/‘A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY’ 65

Everything’s smashed ... how right — but absolutely no suggestion that

it might be their fault — her fault. ‘Why’ asks another woman fetching water
‘why do not you help us?’ ‘You’ being us. At the same time nothing is clearer
straight away than that we cannot — must not leave them to stew in their own
juice ... well anyway it’s a hell of a tangle.
Letter to Cicely Jennings/10 September 1945/Diisseldorf
 Post-War: “The Cumberland Story’/
Burma/England/LSO Film/Festival of
Britain/ Death

1946 From March onwards Jennings was working on location in Workington,

Cumberland on a film about the modernisation of the mining industry, which
was completed as The Cumberland Story by early autumn. By the end of
the year, he was working with lan Dalrymple, who had started up his own
production company, Wessex Films. They had a project to film Roaring
Century, a book by R. J. Cruikshank about the century 1846-1946 — which
would have fitted in well with Jennings’s work on the Industrial Revolution in
the unpublished Pandaemonium. Money was not forthcoming however.
 POST-WAR

In February Jennings went to Burma with a small unit to look at the 1947
possibility of making a film of H. E. Bates’s book The Purple Plain, and he
remained there until the beginning of June. His contract with Wessex was
renewed and it looks as though it was at this point he worked on a
treatment for a film of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd for
Wessex. He was particularly excited by an exhibition of cleaned pictures at
the National Gallery and reviewed it for Our Time, where he described his
politics as ‘those of William Cobbett’.

The Cumberland Story

68 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

1948 Until July he was directing Dim Little Island, a film with Osbert Lancaster,
James Fisher, Ralph Vaughan Williams and an industrialist, John Ormston,
about post-war Britain. At the end of the year he had begun work on a
possible film about the London Symphony Orchestra at work.

1949 Work on the LSO film continued to the middle of the summer, when he
was commissioned by John Grierson and the Festival of Britain Committee
to do afilm on British achievement for the Festival in 1951. He began work
on what was to be Family Portrait in August and this continues through to
June or July of 1950.

1950 At the completion of Family Portrait he was asked by the European

Economic Commission to do a film as part of a series on The Changing
Face of Europe. He chose health, and the projected film was to be The
Good Life. He left England at the beginning of September, looking at
possible locations in France. Switzerland, Italy and then Greece. He died
on the Greek island of Poros on 24 September, after an accident in which
he slipped and fell from a rock. He is buried in Athens.

“Tea Lady’ (drawing, c. 1947)/JD69; “Tea Lady’ (painting, c. 1947)/JD56

 POST-WAR 69

Colorado Claro: Thoughts on the ‘Cleaned Pictures’

As you approach the rooms containing the ‘Cleaned Pictures’, between the
National Gallery entrance and the rooms themselves you mount a flight of
steps flanked by two balconies or wings, on whose walls are hung six pictures
which are not really part of the exhibition, but are connected with it: two
Renoirs (Les Parapluies and La Premiére Sortie), a Manet (La Servante de
Bocks) a Van Gogh landscape, a Degas oil of an intense brick-orange-red, and
a large Delacroix. The choice and placing of these paintings is adroit, to say
the least of it. Five of them represent a moment in European painting when
the artist’s passion for life — for the life around him and for his own craft — had
a directness of vision and of method singularly unencumbered by official or
theoretical trappings, religious, mythological, political or of his own making.
So while these pictures are placed like trumpeters to herald the exhibition, they
have also a very practical use in leading our vision from the grey and nervous
landscape of Trafalgar Square to the earlier Bacchanalia of Rubens and
Poussin.
More than that. Renoir and the rest have not been misted over either by
the dirt of Time or by man’s “Gallery varnish’ and they are still close enough
to us not have become ‘sacred’. In front of them a painter still thinks, sees how
they were painted. [...] Among the crowds at the Exhibition (and there are
crowds) there are of course those who with a fanatical look in the eye point to
the two Velasquez portraits of Philip IV and cry out aloud: ‘Velasquez never
painted ...’ Of course they don’t really mean that they were looking over the
artist’s shoulder in Madrid three centuries ago, though it sounds like it. They
mean that the zdea — the myth if you like — of Velasquez on which they have
been brought up and nourished, and to which maybe their own painting is
related, has been attacked and seriously damaged. They are men defending
vested interests. Of course many ideas are damaged by this exhibition. The
idea for example of Rubens and Claude as painters of golden landscapes. The
colour of Poussin, even of Veronese (whose work seems most of all to gain
from ‘cleaning’) are seen to be as 4right (to leave aside for the moment subtler
questions) as that of Degas and Renoir. Vollard has reported Renoir’s visit to
the tobacconist’s where he noticed the words Colorado Claro on a box of
cigars, and saw in them (or in his mistranslation of them) the slogan of his
70 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

ideal in painting: Coloré Clair ... That is precisely one’s impression of the
‘Cleaned Pictures’.
The majority of the Old Masters themselves can have had little idea of
the use to which their pictures are put to-day, clean or dirty. Little idea of the
smoke-trailing city, the island of machines, the atom-haunted world from
whose walls their children now look out. The essential thing about the cleaning
is that we have now removed the things they did not intend — dirt, yellow
varnish, and glass ... the cleaners of the National Gallery under enlightened
direction have cleared away so much fake mystery, we must say also that what
they have revealed is a thousand times more marvellous, more poetic, and in
another sense mysterious [...] We can watch Poussin’s brush decorate with blue
leaf-strokes the white porcelain bowl as it catches the juice of the grape. Leaf-
strokes like those with which the girls in the potteries decorate export china ...
and then, not like. The more we gaze (as now we may) — the deeper we look —
the more the ‘mystery of the craft’ affects us. Paint and not paint,
simultaneously. Decoration — coloré, clair ... but containing like a signature the
character, the emotions, the wishes and regrets of a human lifetime.
Review in Our Time/December 1947

The English
[...] There are other characteristics of the English, well known to their
neighbours, but altogether unmentioned by themselves. Their propensity for
endless aggressive war, for example. The Hundred Years War looks quite
different from the French side of the Channel. Let those who think it simply a
piece of medieval romanticism ask the Scots — or the Welsh — about their
experiences. It would be inadvisable to ask the Irish.
[...] Now for some strange reason, the Englishman likes to think of
himself as a sheep; and so great is his artistry, so thoroughly does he see
himself in any part which he has assumed, that he frequently deceives not only
himself, but others. This mild, beneficent creature, easily imposed upon,
unmindful of injury, is a pose. But like all the best poses, it takes in its author
as well. The English are not hypocritical. They are sincere. In that lies their
deadly danger to others.
* KK
 POST-WAR 71

Family Portrait
12 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

The English are in fact a violent, savage race; passionately artistic,

enormously addicted to pattern, with a faculty beyond all other people of
ignoring their neighbours, their surroundings, or in the last resort, themselves.
They have a power of poetry which is the despair of the rest of the world.
They produce from time to time personalities transcending ordinary human
limitations. Then they drive other nations to a frenzy by patronizing these
archangels who have come among them, and by indicating that any ordinary
Englishman could do better if he liked to take the trouble. As exemplified in
Ben Johnson’s insufferable appreciation of Shakespeare.
[...] they are hard pressed just now. The English have been a Great
Power for quite a long time, and the adjustments necessary if they are to
remain in that class are profound. They will require to people continents from
their loins, as they did after the discovery of America; but at the same time
they will have to recreate the Anglo-French State of the Angevins, and add to
it the conquests of Charlemagne. This is an extensive programme. It is
certainly worthwhile for them to take stock. What sort of people are they, the
oldest of the Old Powers, the youngest — indeed the unborn — of the Newest
Powers, starting to challenge Fate again?
[...] The furious industrial epoch, of which England was the pioneer
and of which she is still much the most extreme example, cannot be so put
aside. There is no country so urbanized as England. There is no country with
so small a percentage of its population engaged on the land. There is no
country with such an energy of horse-power heaped and crammed into so
small a space. In spite of the fact that a grocer’s calendar will carry a picture of
a cottage in the snow, or that the frontispiece of the Listener may show a
village spire, England, Modern England, is a series of city streets. The streets
of London are paralleled by the streets of Birmingham, by the streets of
Yorkshire and Lancashire. Nine out of every ten Englishmen anywhere are
born in the towns and bred in the streets. [...]
This is the English love of pattern, of order, one of their fundamental
qualities. It is responsible for their delight in ships, the supreme example of a
patterned life, for their fame abroad as troupe dancers (les Girls), for the
spectacle of Trooping the Colour.
[...] This absorption in pattern is one aspect of the general power of
 POST-WAR 73

absorption, of concentration, which the Englishman so specially enjoys. It is

possible that this has enabled him to pass into a civilization of streets without
becoming a part of it. So the English travel in trains; not a company, but a
collection of individuals; first turning each carriage into a row of cottages —
the word compartment is a word of praise — and then sitting in each corner
with the same blank denial of any other presence that the lovers show in parks.
The English live in cities but they are not citified; they seldom produce for
example, that characteristic of a city, the mob. They are urbane without being
urban; creating their own environment within their own being, they can dwell
in the midst of twenty miles of paving stones and pretend, with the aid of a
back green or a flower pot, that they are in a hamlet on the Downs. Or so it
seems to the outsider. Perhaps the English have something completely
different in their heads.
Review of The English by Ernest Barker/
Times Literary Supplement/7 August 1948

A Visit to the Shan States, Burma

We had gone straight north from Rangoon by car along flat country — straight
road and paddy-fields for nearly three hundred miles and then began to climb
a little into wild cactus country — like pictures of Mexico — the road terrible
and stories of dacoits — spent the night at Meiktila — in front of a wonderful
lake with splendid pagodas and then the next morning turned east off the main
road and made for a hill station called Taunggye which is five thousand feet
up and where the mountains and waterfalls and bamboo groves and fir trees
really look exactly like Chinese paintings. The people don’t speak Burmese
and some of the hill tribes wear extraordinary black and dark blue costumes —
women in black tunics and trousers with silver ornaments and great black
turbans. Splendid Chinese cooking here in the restaurants and (as it is quite
cold at night) wood fires — a kind of farm house existence on a permanently
perfect day in the Lakes. A few white clouds on the hill tops — a gigantic
Buddha protected from the monsoon by roofs of corrugated iron — then Inle
lake where the waterside dwellers propel their canoes with one leg round the
paddle: called ‘leg rowers’. Miles and miles of blue and purple hills, the earth
orange or deep red, the bamboos delicate yellows and greens. Returning we
Tie HUMPHREY JENNINGS

came over a private road in the mountains in the country of the Red Karens,
who are really wild looking people — animists, not Buddhist — cutting timber
and burning patches of the jungle to grow hill-rice. This perilous mountain
road brought us at last to Mauchi-mine — which is one of the principal
tungsten or wolfram mines in the world. Approached only by two private
roads, through jungle and forest — 95 miles to the nearest town — you have to
pass armed police at barriers to get in to what is a complete ‘lost world’. In a
circle of hills there are a mass of bungalows — some belonging to the original
Karens who won’t work in the mine, some to a complete Sikh and Hindu
community who are the miners — and the ones on the top to the Managers and
Engineers who are British and South African who have a complete high-class
suburban life, with wives and daughters who play tennis and put on long
dresses in the evening and grow sweet peas. The company appears to have no
allegiance to anyone except Queen Victoria in person who came to an
agreement with the Karens. We spent two nights there — going underground
(into the side of a hill) to look at the mine — being saluted by the Sikhs at every
turn — (but not by the Karens) and then doing the 95 miles back to relative
civilisation or barbarism or whatever. Burma is certainly a surprising place.
Letter to Cicely Jennings/1 March 1947

Burmese photographs (1947)/MLJ

 POST-WAR TS)

The London Symphony Orchestra at Work

SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 1949. ALBERT HALL

Rehearsal with soloists only of Messiah under Sir Malcolm Sargent.
10.30 a.m. Splendid opening picture — a totally empty Albert Hall. We
are looking from the steps up from the band room; we can see the lights in the
battens and beyond them, in the gloom, 5000 vacant seats. In the foreground
the desks are in position but the platform is also bare except for the aged figure
of the librarian, who is slowly distributing the orchestral parts, section by
section (the librarian and Ernie the LSO porter are, of course, key figures in
the early stages of a rehearsal or concert).
The orchestra assemble (afternoon performance — they are dressed
already): two violins, coming as usual from their camping-ground in block H,
discuss ‘what that flower is’, pointing with bow to flower - border along platform
edge — similar gesture to that of a player pointing with bow to note in score. As
this is a choral work the orchestra are nearly all ranged on the flat; men are
straightening seats as usual — soloists enter — slight applause — Sargent enters.
“May I wish you a happy and successful New Year!’ — applause. ‘8’, i.e.
8 in a bar — and straight into overture, taking short sections only — opening,
sections in middle, and letter F to end.
The two women soloists (Isobel Baillie and Kathleen Ferrier) are sitting
muffled up in really arctic-looking furs.
Fragments of each section: 2 — opening leading to “Comfort ye’ — break
off — then on to four bars before C (soloist singing sitting), and so on.
Opening of 5 — opening of 6. The ‘two in bar’ section, i.e. 6D prestissimo —
then line before I, i.e. the end of 6 and so on; ‘that’s it — not really ritardando —
should be deliberamente’.
‘All right, now we start No 11’; ‘beginning of 12’; 13: ‘now may I remind
you that you do not put on your mutes 2 bars before 8 but | bar ...’
Men in the roof swinging and raising lights: ‘In 10 I want special
attention to double-basses.’
During the Pastoral Symphony, men in the roof shout “Wo!” ‘2 bars
before B’ — ‘Wo’ ‘Ti-ya- da- ti-ya da. Wait for it, there’s no hurry.’ S. in his
element in Handel. ‘You don’t listen — I want the outside players to put on
76 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

their mutes and start playing one bar before B, the inside players stop playing
one bar before B — keep the violins up — then you all come in — during 14 you
quietly take off your mutes.’
The soloists just indicate their parts - sitting like monks. Roof: ‘Up on
that one, Harry!’ Soprano singing angel’s recitative without music in 15. “Up,
Harry! Wo!’ ‘17, please.’ 2 bars from the end — really have a short bow at the
end then it doesn’t go on.’ ‘Good.’ 18: In the gloom under the dome the unlit
lamps swing and clank. ‘UP!’ Imagine the LSO seen from the point of view of
Harry in the roof! ‘21 is out’ — everyone marks this.
... So on — ‘You don’t stand for Hallelujah Chorus’ — this to orchestra, of
course. Discussion of introduction to 45, ‘I know that my Redeemer’: ‘Normal
playing — there — everyone can hear the difference — I assure you it’s very seldom
heard played well — you play exactly what’s there — 1.2.3.4. — 1 —1.2.3.4—I’. 48:
Discussion of where George Eskdale shall stand for “The trumpet shall sound’.
The string sections in the Amen: ‘Strings, that’s the real sort of music — it’s a joy
to hear it clear like that.’ Instructions to drummer for end.
The whole of the above rehearsal took one hour and showed what a
prodigious stage-manager Sargent is.
“Working Sketches of an Orchestra’ in
London Symphony: Portrait of an Orchestra/ London 1954

Beware of Locomotives
Driving in a car near Johnson’s Wharf and by the railway we came across the
notice “Beware of Locomotives’. We were in a car. It was like the picture by
Stubbs of a cave and in the entrance a white horse who is surprised by a lioness.
The horse has its eyes open with fright and its back legs beginning to give way.
The car is the lioness and the horse the locomotive. There is a well-known type
of picture in early films of a level crossing with an open car and an approaching
train with the terrified eyes of the people in the car, their hands lifted up as the
train smashes the gates. This is a kind of reversal of the horse-lion situation.
The horse has become stronger than the lion. So — Beware of Locomotives.
A steam locomotive is a thing in itself as separate from its train of trucks
or carriages as a horse is from its cart. The transformation of the horse into a
locomotive is perfectly shown in ‘The Cyclopede’ and in other horse-
 POST-WAR

locomotives where the horse, from pulling the truck was put inside one with a
moving floor turning the wheels. The transformation of the lions and tigers
also into machines you can find in Blake.
You know when a locomotive is streamlined it loses its smoke stack,
sometimes altogether: and that produces a sort of worry in us. The sequence
funnel, dome, valve and cabin, turns into a class-series: top-hat, Bowler, cloth cap.

Images
It is essential to observe that this selection and presentation of images does not
depend in any way on — the images in this list are not chosen on any power
of — symbolism. They may or may not have been used as symbols of this and
that in the past but at the present they are simple images. A horse is a horse, an
apple is an apple. An image of a horse is an image of a horse, and an image of
an apple is an image of an apple. An image of a horse is an image of a
locomotive, an image of an apple is an image of the sun and so on.
But they are not images of God, or divine Wisdom. Nor are they
significant forms or ‘pure forms’: an apple is an apple. An object cannot
immediately exchange its being with another object. An apple cannot
immediately become a coal. But an image of an object is immediately
exchangeable with another image. An image of a horse can become an image
of a locomotive. How?
Precisely through poetry and painting — ‘La terre est bleue comme une
orange’.
Beyond the Life of Man/unpublished n.d.

Apples/[‘Imaginary Portrait of Sir Isaac Newton’] (1940)/MLJ

A Note on Images
CHARLES MADGE

I think it may help to understand Humphrey Jennings’ paintings if one

reconsiders what he meant by ‘the image’. It was a meaning personal to
himself and bound up with his early researches into poetry and painting. His
use of ‘image’ is not far off from the way it is used in psychology, in literary
criticism and in surrealist theory, but it is not quite identical with any of these.
It has resemblances to the psychological concept of the gestalt: ‘the
combination of many effects, each utterly insensible alone, into one sum of
fine effect’.
The above quotation is not from a gestalt psychologist, but from the
Diary of Michael Faraday, the physicist,’ and is part of a passage, dated June
1850, which is included by Humphrey Jennings in Pandaemonium, his great
collection of ‘images’ chosen to illustrate the transformation in our way of
looking at the world between 1660 and 1866. The full passage from Faraday’s
diary is as follows and constitutes in itself a kind of ‘image of the image’:
‘A balloon went up on Saturday Evng. (22 instant) from Vauxhall. The
evening was very clear and the Sun bright: the balloon was very high, so that
I could not see the car from Queen Square, Bloomsbury, and looked like a
golden ball. Ballast was thrown out two or three times and was probably sand;
but the dust of it had this effect, that a stream of golden cloud seemed to
descend from the balloon, shooting downwards for a moment, and then
remained apparently stationary, the balloon and it separating very slowly. It
shews the wonderful manner in which (each) particle of this dusty cloud must,
have made its impression on the eye by the light reflected from it, and is a fine
illustration of the combination of many effects, each utterly insensible alone,
into one sum of fine effect’.
 A NOTE ON IMAGES 79

The ‘image’ here consists not only of the balloon, the golden cloud of
dust particles, Vauxhall, the date, Faraday watching and Faraday’s physical
discoveries, but of the relations between these elements and other elements, all
ordered into a larger universe of imagery. The individual image, and the
imaginative eye that seizes it, is a point of ordonnance in such a universe. It is
not only verbal, or visual, or emotional, although it is all these. It is not in the
elements, but in their coming together at a particular moment, that the magical
potency lies.
‘But at the present moment the Surrealists (especially Ernst) are
exploiting the rather temporary emotive qualities of incongruity provided by
the juxtaposition of objects as objects (with literary associations). There are
other pieces of myth-construction in /a jeune peinture, related to Surrealism:
dream-suggestion has been used by Sima, metamorphosis and animal combats
by Masson, and Roux has extended the idea of metamorphosis into a complete
world-reconstruction by symbolism. The work of these painters also relies
greatly on the actual shock of following the literary metamorphosis. Thus,
both technique and myth are at present using our associations for their power;
a state of affairs which by its nature cannot last. A new solidity as firm as
Cubism, but fluid, not static, is required. Precisely such a solidity both of
technique and myth we find in South African rock painting ...’
This is one of Humphrey Jennings’s very few published statements on
painting. It comes from an essay on ‘Rock-painting and La jeune peinture’,
signed by himself and G. F. Noxon, which appeared in the Spring number of
Experiment (a Cambridge magazine) in 1931, twenty years ago. It explains
very well what he aimed at in his own painting. ‘A new solidity as firm as
Cubism, but fluid’. The art that Humphrey Jennings was seeking must reflect
a cosmos in flux. In this flux are assemblages, or shapes, or patterns, of relative
intensity, and fixity, and certainty. Paradoxically solid and fluid, the images are
moments in the flow of human experience. The shape is solid, but the line that
encloses it is fluid, as it awaits the next metamorphosis.
In the same essay, Jennings calls for ‘the use of technique, to create
mutations in the subject, and the subject thereby to be in its proper place, as
the basis of a metamorphosis by paint and not by literary substitution’.
Metamorphosis by paint is in three words what Humphrey Jennings attempted
80 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

as a painter and he took his medium

seriously. In this medium, the canvas
and the paint mattered; in poetry, the
voice and the page. Both poetry and
painting, as he understood them, are
outside ‘literature’, or more strictly
are on planes intersecting the literary
plane. Jennings in conversation often
asserted his independence of
literature, which he saw as a muddle
of unrealised images and inadequate
techniques. His aim was to seize and
create ‘mutations in the subject’,
liberating human perceptions from
the literature that surrounds them.
The ‘subject’ of a painting, or a
poem, is therefore the nucleus of an
image, the ordering point. Humphrey
Jennings returned again and again to certain ‘subjects’, in his battle to
transform them. The horse, the steam engine, the plough, the dome of St.
Paul’s, these were some of his ‘subjects’ and they are the nucleus or core of
images that he created in paint, in poetry and in film.
The image of the plough, to take an example, is illustrated in some of
the paintings in this exhibition. The same image appears in a poem, “The
Plough’, written in 1948:

The gallows, the vine, the gang, the beet, the subsoil, the hoe,
The Norfolk wheel,
Whether in Tull’s tune-book, Jefferson’s design, on the Illinois prairie or pagoda ground,
All, all I see reflected in the giant shadow plough;
The gallows coloured green, the vine coloured red, the gang-plough lemon yellow,
sombre purples and browns,
And the Norfolk wheel itself deep blue, standing alone in the snow.

Locomotive (c. 1936)/JD74

 A NOTE ON IMAGES 81

These names ‘the gallows, the vine’ and so on, are kinds of plough.
Jethro Tull was a musician and designer of ploughs in the early eighteenth
century. Jefferson is Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States,
and also a designer of ploughs. There are references to America and the Far
East, but the emphatic reference is to Jennings’s native East Anglia. The image
therefore has historical and geographical coordinates but it belongs also to that
‘inner labour’, that ‘private zone of culture’, which the psycho-analyst* finds
to be characteristic of ‘the artist and scientist, the mystic and the lunatic — for
that matter all of us’ and on which we expend so much of our mental energies.
In the poem on the plough, and by implication in the paintings, there is a
distinction between the local, coloured ploughs and the achromatic, abstracted
‘giant shadow plough’, in its primitive simplicity, a ‘giant’ because ‘culture’
itself means, literally, tillage. Yet in another sense the colours represent the
poetry of the plough, as opposed to its utility. Or rather, it is by those to whom
the plough is coloured by poetry that new kinds of plough will be designed.
(Jethro Tull designed his ploughs on analogies suggested by musical
instruments.) In this sense, Humphrey Jennings is attempting a metamorphosis
of the plough by paint: and not of the plough only, but by implication a
metamorphosis of other ‘means of production’, to use the Marxist phrase.
Another example will further illustrate how an image has both a local
and a universal significance. In one of his “war poems’ Jennings wrote:

I see London.
Isee the dome of Saint Paul’s like the forehead of Darwin.

The image of St. Paul’s and its dome is recurrent also in those paintings
in which is depicted a kind of generalised landscape of London. In
Pandaemonium, many passages centre around St. Paul’s. In particular there is
a very beautiful quotation from Faraday in which, by an optical illusion, it
seemed that ‘rays of darkness were issuing from the Church’ — a radar-like
image. St. Paul’s embodies in its architecture the rational side of
protestantism. It stands as a monument to the opening of that great epoch of
material and mental transformation with which Pandaemonium is concerned.
And yet at the same time the dome of St. Paul’s is only one dome of many
82 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

St. Paul’s Cathedral (1942)/JD35

domes. It stands for all the domes and, by metaphor, for all the dome-like
foreheads of scientists, for the collective intellection of centuries and nations.
St. Paul’s is magnificently photographed in Family Portrait, Humphrey
Jennings’s last film in which he tried to put our past, present and future in
simple but persuasive unity. His understanding of the past, his sense of the
present, were vivified by his acceptance of the future. To quote from the script
of Family Portrait which he wrote so soon before his death:
“Tonight there are new shapes on the skylines of home ... the fantastic
antennae of modern science, reaching out to the unknown ... Peacetime
versions of radar picking up radio waves coming in from the blank spaces in the
Milky Way — or plotting the tracks of meteors as they rush through the sky ...’
“That’s a meteor there ...’
Some of the more recent paintings have short lines flying through them
which suggest the tracks of meteors, or the paths of atomic particles, and these
paintings undoubtedly are connected with the imaginative impact of modern
physics. They record something of the meteoric quality of Humphrey
Jennings himself.
From a pamphlet produced by the Institute of Contemporary Arts,
“Humphrey Jennings, 1907-1950” n.d. [1951]
 Humphrey Jennings
KATHLEEN RAINE

Those who knew Humphrey Jennings took his genius for granted, as we do
the sun. Natural phenomena cause no surprise; and Humphrey’s mind had the
quality of Tao (not that he would have called himself a taoist, if only because
‘the names that can be named are not the universal names’), the apparent
simplicity of light, or the solar system. Only now that he is removed, we are
aware that we shall never again know anything like it. His greatness, like that
of Coleridge, is something that only those who knew him can fully realise; for
it was the total phenomenon of his remarkable mind, activated by the most
powerful imagination I have ever encountered in a living man, that made
knowing him such a wonderful experience to those who came within
measuring distance of understanding him.
How much of that genius is expressed in his paintings will be judged finally
by those who never knew him. He always regarded himself as, before everything,
a painter; film-making was of secondary importance and the writing of poems an
occasional mode of expression; and it is significant that Humphrey himself said,
early last year, that he had just begun to be sufficiently satisfied with his work to
feel that the time had come for an exhibition. He had mastered his style.
Humphrey was aware of most of his problems twenty years ago; but
those who listened, spellbound by his discourses on his theories of painting,
would have been baffled by the canvases alone. Sometimes he would paint
some apparently naively simple, realistic object — like a matchbox; or,
approaching the problem from another point of view, only a few brushmarks,
of infinite delicacy of touch and subtlety of colour, on canvases left largely
bare — so left because every brushmark must be made with meaning,
deliberately placed according to a complex imaginative operation, involving
84 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

both conscious thought and instinctive sensibility. How few poets or painters
know even so much of truth as to avoid falsehood. In about the year 1929,
Humphrey was preoccupied for months with the problem of where the first
brushmark, that determines the whole painting, should be made on the canvas.
French in visual perception, English in his sense of the poetic image, Chinese
in his philosophy of how an action (painting in particular) should be
performed, he sought simultaneously for three kinds of truth; in his mature
work, so it seems to me, all these are achieved.
Humphrey Jennings may be seen as a product of the same school (that of
Professor I. A. Richards’s ‘scientific’ literary criticism) that produced William
Empson’s conception of the ambiguity (more properly the multiplicity) of the
poetic statement. Charles Madge has said virtually all that need to be said on
Humphrey Jennings’s idea of the Image, but in parenthesis I may mention one
source on which he drew which might be overlooked — the syncretic images of
the Tarot. Two of these especially are recurring themes in his paintings — the
Chariot, resolving itself into horse-team and locomotive; and the ‘maison
Dieu’, the house struck by fire from heaven. The latter was one of Humphrey
Jennings’s key images many years before the war made the symbol actual, and
provided him with the theme of his film, Fires Were Started; but it was, to his
astonishingly objective mind, in the very nature of a symbolic situation that it
must produce itself, as an event, in historical actuality. This must follow from
the fact that history, as Humphrey Jennings, like Blake, conceived it, is the
realisation of human imaginings. In this he went a stage beyond the surrealists,
for whom the mental elaboration of images was sufficient in itself; for
Humphrey Jennings the final test of an image was its objective reality. Take the
Chariot, the abstract Tarot symbol of human power and achievement, one of
Humphrey’s earliest themes. Gray, in the Progress of Poesy, describes
successively the Triumph of Mars, Hyperion, and at last the poet himself, in
symbols no less characteristic of Humphrey Jennings than of Gray himself:

Behold ... (the poet’s) car

Wide o’er the fields of glory bear
Two coursers of etherial race
With necks in thunder clothed, and long-resounding pace.
 HUMPHREY JENNINGS 85

Analysing the image, Humphrey referred it back to Milton’s ‘Chariot of

paternal deity’; but the image must be realised as well as analysed. In his last
film, Family Portrait, as the commentator speaks a line of Blake, that, in itself,
refers back both to Gray and Milton, ‘bring me my chariot of fire’, a
locomotive moves slowly forwards, symbol of the Triumph of the Iron Horse.
History must realise, or it is mere literature.
Certainly no poet, since Blake, has understood English history, and in
particular the Industrial Revolution, with the twofold intensity of observation
and imagination that Humphrey Jennings brought to bear on the industrial
landscape, the locomotive, the fine instruments of modern science. For him,
as for Blake, London was “a human awful wonder of God’. Yet as against the
advance of the locomotive, we have the figure of Lord Byron, man born free,
who refuses ‘the unvarying pace between rocky walls’ imposed by the triumph
of the machine. It is impossible to say in few words what conclusions

Byron’s House at Missolonghi (1939-40), A. R. V. Cooper

86 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Humphrey Jennings had reached on questions of such complexity as those

presented by the Industrial Revolution; but it is perhaps significant that it is to
the pre-industrial symbols of the Plough, the Windmill, and the Harvest Field
that he returned most often, and to the horse, docile yet wild. The culture of
the Plough and the Horse reverences and preserves the earth and the natural
instincts of the living creature and it was culture of this kind that H. J. found
and loved in provincial France, in Burma, and in the villages of Greece. On
almost the last occasion that I saw him, we were walking over Battersea
Bridge, Humphrey propounding a Utopian scheme for turning the foul waters
of the Thames into fish-ponds. Raising his arm with a characteristic gesture
towards the industrial landscape from Lots Road Power Station to Battersea,
he said, “This has all grown up within less than two hundred years. Has anyone
ever suggested that this was the way in which human beings ought to live? It
will all have to go, it has been a terrible mistake!’ Not that he envisaged a
return to any particular period, or any return at all. All his feeling was for the
modern, for the growing-point of the living organism of Man society. The
symbols that he sought to create or recreate belong neither to past nor future,
but to certain permanent principles that must be observed for the preservation
of man in a stable and mutually life-giving relationship with the earth that he
inhabits, its natural forces and resources.
From the ICA pamphlet (1951)

Cornfield (c.1948)/MLJ
 Only Connect: Some Aspects of the Work of
Humphrey Jennings
LINDSAY ANDERSON

It is difficult to write anything but personally about the films of Humphrey

Jennings. This is not of course to say that a full and documented account of his
work in the cinema would not be of the greatest interest: anyone who
undertook such a study would certainly merit our gratitude. But the sources are
diffuse. Friends and colleagues would have to be sought out and questioned;
poems and paintings tracked down; and, above all, the close texture of the films
themselves would have to be exhaustively examined. My aim must be more
modest, merely hoping to stimulate by offering some quite personal reactions,
and by trying to explain why I think these pictures are so good.
Jennings’s films are all documentaries, all made firmly within the
framework of the British documentary movement. This fact ought not to
strike a chill, for surely ‘the creative interpretation of actuality’ should suggest
an exciting, endlessly intriguing use of the cinema; and yet it must be admitted
that the overtones of the term are not immediately attractive. Indeed it comes
as something of a surprise to learn that this unique and fascinating artist was
from the beginning of his career in films an inside member of Grierson’s
GPO Unit (with which he first worked in 1934), and made all his best films as
official, sponsored propaganda during the second world war. His subjects
were thus, at least on the surface, the common ones; yet his manner of
expression was always individual, and became more and more so. It was a style
that bore the closest possible relationship to his theme — to that aspect of his
subjects which his particular vision caused him consistently to stress. It was,
that is to say, a poetic style. In fact it might reasonably be contended that
Humphrey Jennings is the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced.
88 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

I
He started directing films in 1939 (we may leave out of account an insignificant
experiment in 1935, in collaboration with Len Lye); and the date is significant,
for it was the war that fertilised his talent and created the conditions in which
his best work was produced. Watching one of Jennings’s early pictures,
Speaking from America, which was made to explain the workings of the
transatlantic radiotelephone system, one would hardly suspect the personal
qualities that characterise the pictures he was making only a short while later.
There seems to have been more evidence of these in Spare Time, a film on the
use of leisure among industrial workers: a mordant sequence of a carnival
procession, drab and shoddy, in a Northern city aroused the wrath of more
orthodox documentarians, and Basil Wright has mentioned other scenes, more
sympathetically shot: ‘the pigeon-fancier, the “lurcher-loving collier” and the
choir rehearsal are all important clues to Humphrey’s development’. Certainly
such an affectionate response to simple pleasures is more characteristic of
Jennings’s later work than any emphasis of satire.
If there had been no war, though, could that development ever have
taken place? Humphrey Jennings was never happy with narrowly
propagandist subjects, any more than he was with the technical exposition of
Speaking from America. But in wartime people become important, and
observation of them is regarded in itself as a justifiable subject for filming,
without any more specific ‘selling angle’ than their sturdiness of spirit.
Happily, this was the right subject for Jennings. With Cavalcanti, Harry Watt
and Pat Jackson he made The First Days, a picture of life on the home front
in the early months of the war. On his own, he then directed Spring Offensive,
about farming and the new development of agricultural land in the Eastern
counties; in 1940 he worked again with Harry Watt on London Can Take It,
another picture of the home front; and in 1941, with Heart of Britain, he
showed something of the way in which the people of Northern industrial
Britain were meeting the challenge of war.
These films did their jobs well, and social historians of the future will
find in them much that makes vivid the atmosphere and manners of their
period. Ordinary people are sharply glimpsed in them, and the ordinary sounds
that were part of the fabric of their lives reinforce the glimpses and sometimes
 ONLY CONNECT 89

comment on them: a lorry-load of youthful conscripts speeds down the road in

blessed ignorance of the future, as a jaunty singer gives out ‘We’re going to
hang out our washing on the Siegfried line’. In the films which Jennings made
in collaboration, it is risky, of course, to draw attention too certainly to any
particular feature as being his: yet here and there are images and effects which
unmistakably betray his sensibility. Immense women knitting furiously for the
troops; a couple of cockney mothers commenting to each other on the
quietness of the streets now that the children have gone; the King and Queen
unostentatiously shown inspecting the air raid damage in their own back
garden. Spring Offensive is less sure in its touch, rather awkward in its staged
conversations and rather over-elaborate in its images; Heart of Britain plainly
offered a subject that Jennings found more congenial. Again the sense of
human contact is direct: a steel-worker discussing his ARP duty with his mate,
a sturdy matron of the WVS looking straight at us through the camera as she
touchingly describes her pride at being able to help the rescue workers, if only
by serving cups of tea. And along with these plain, spontaneous encounters
come telling shots of landscape and background, amplifying and reinforcing. A
style, in fact, is being hammered out in these films; a style based on a peculiar
intimacy of observation, a fascination with the commonplace thing or person
that is significant precisely because it is commonplace, and with the whole
pattern that can emerge when such commonplace, significant things and people
are fitted together in the right order.
Although it is evident that the imagination at work in all these early
pictures is instinctively a cinematic one, in none of them does one feel that the
imagination is working with absolute freedom. All the films are accompanied
by commentaries, in some cases crudely propagandist, in others serviceable
and decent enough; but almost consistently these off-screen words clog and
impede the progress of the picture. The images are so justly chosen, and so
explicitly assembled, that there is nothing for the commentator to say. The
effect — particularly if we have Jennings’s later achievements in mind — is
cramped. The material is there, the elements are assembled; but the fusion
does not take place that alone can create the poetic whole that is greater than
the sum of its parts. And then comes the last sequence of Heart of Britain.
The Huddersfield Choral Society rises before Malcolm Sargent, and the
90 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

homely, buxom housewives, the black-coated workers, and the men from the
mills burst into the Hallelujah Chorus. The sound of their singing continues,
and we see landscapes and noble buildings, and then a factory where bombers
are being built. Back and forth go these contrasting, conjunctive images, until
the music broadens out to its conclusion, the roar of engines joins in, and the
bombers take off. The sequence is not a long one, and there are unfortunate
intrusions from the commentator, but the effect is extraordinary, and the
implications obvious. Jennings has found his style.

Ul
Words for Battle, Listen to Britain, Fires Were Started, A Diary for Timothy.
To the enthusiast for Jennings these titles have a ring which makes it a pleasure
simply to speak them, or to set them down in writing; for these are the films in
which, between 1941 and 1945, we can see that completely individual style
developing from tentative discovery and experiment to mature certainty. They
are all films of Britain at war, and yet their feeling is never, or almost never,
warlike. They are committed to the war — for all his sensibility there does not
seem to have been anything of the pacifist about Jennings — but their real
inspiration is pride, an unaggressive pride in the courage and doggedness of
ordinary British people. Kathleen Raine, a friend of Jennings and his
contemporary at Cambridge, has written: “What counted for Humphrey was
the expression, by certain people, of the ever-growing spirit of man; and, in
particular, of the spirit of England’. It is easy to see how the atmosphere of the
country at war could stimulate and inspire an artist so bent. For it is at such a
time that the spirit of a country becomes manifest, the sense of tradition and
community sharpened as (alas) it rarely is in time of peace. ‘He sought
therefore for a public imagery, a public poetry.’ In a country at war we are all
members one of another, in a sense that is obvious to the least spiritually-
minded.
‘Only connect’. It is surely no coincidence that Jennings chose for his
writer on A Diary for Timothy the wise and kindly humanist who had placed
that epigraph on the title page of his best novel. The phrase at any rate is apt
to describe not merely the film on which Jennings worked with E. M. Forster,
but this whole series of pictures which he made during the war. He had a mind
 ONLY CONNECT 91

that delighted in simile and the unexpected relationship. (‘It was he’, wrote
Grierson, ‘who discovered the Louis Quinze properties of a Lyons’ swiss
roll’.) Ona deeper level, he loved to link one event with another, the past with
the present, person to person. Thus the theme of Words for Battle is the
interpretation of great poems of the past through events of the present — a
somewhat artificial idea, though brilliantly executed. It is perhaps significant,
though, that the film springs to a new kind of life altogether in its last
sequence, as the words of Lincoln at Gettysburg are followed by the clatter of
tanks driving into Parliament Square past the Lincoln statue: the sound of the
tanks merges in turn into the grand music of Handel, and suddenly the camera
is following a succession of men and women in uniform, striding along the
pavement cheery and casual, endowed by the music, by the urgent rhythm of
the cutting, and by the solemnity of what has gone before (to which we feel
they are heirs) with an astonishing and breathtaking dignity, a mortal
splendour.
As if taking its cue from the success of this wonderful passage, Listen to
Britain dispenses with commentary altogether. Here the subject is simply the
sights and sounds of wartime Britain over a period of some twenty-four
hours. To people who have not seen the film it is difficult to describe its
fascination — something quite apart from its purely nostalgic appeal to anyone
who lived through those years in this country. The picture is a stylistic triumph
(Jennings shared the credit with his editor, Stewart McAllister), a succession
of marvellously evocative images freely linked by contrasting and
complementary sounds; and yet it is not for its quality of form that one
remembers it most warmly, but for the continuous sensitivity of its human
regard. It is a fresh and loving eye that Jennings turns on to those Canadian
soldiers, singing to an accordion to while away a long train journey; or on to
that jolly factory girl singing ‘Yes my Darling Daughter’ at her machine; or on
to the crowded floor of the Blackpool Tower Ballroom; or the beautiful, sad-
faced woman who is singing “The Ash Grove’ at an ambulance station piano.
Emotion in fact (it is something one often forgets) can be conveyed as
unmistakably through the working of a film camera as by the manipulation of
pen or paint brush. To Jennings this was a transfigured landscape, and he
recorded its transfiguration on film.
HUMPHREY JENNINGS

A sequence from A Diary for Timothy ;

The characters have been introduced and the theme of the film established — a poetic
summary of life in Britain during the last year of the war.
The sequence is set in the late summer and autumn of 1944. It begins with the voice
of Michael Redgrave reading E. M. Forster’s commentary in voiceover. Shot scale is indicated
as follows: Close-up C.U./close shot C.S./Medium shot M.S./long shot L.S.

6. A working class family group gathered

round their wireless.
‘_.. those who fought the good fight and kept
the faith with you at home, and those who
still fought magnificently on. They were the
last of the few.’
7. C.U. wireless set speaker.
‘T last saw them yesterday morning, as they
dribbled into Nijmegen.’

1. ‘And you didn’t know, and couldn’t know;

and didn’t care. Safe in your pram’.
A bugle call sounds, faintly.
2. L.S. Quarry. A group of miners some
distance away are looking at a newspaper.
‘But listen, Tim; listen to this’.
The call continues.

8. “They had staggered and walked and

waded all night from Arnhem, about ten
miles north. We were busy asking each other
if this or that one had been seen.”
9. C.U., another wireless.
‘Late in the afternoon before, we were told
that the remnants of the Ist Airborne
Division were going to pull out that night.’
10. C.U. Tim’s mother listening.
3. Bugle call swells up. “Perhaps I should remind you here that these
4. The headline of the newspaper flapping in were men of no ordinary calibre. They’d
the wind: the word ARNHEM. been nine days in that little space I
Bugle call fades under the voice of Frank mentioned, being mortared and shelled,
Phillips reading a BBC war report machine-gunned and sniped from all round.’
‘About five miles to the west of Arnhem...’ 11. C.U. another wireless.
5. A wireless set. The camera tracks in. ‘For the last three days they had no water,
*... ina space 1,500 yards by 900 on that last very little but small arms ammunition, and
day I saw the dead and the living ...’ rations cut to one-sixth.
 Q
ONLY CONNECT 9 Bo)

12. ‘Luckily or unluckily it rained, and they

caught the water in their capes and drank
that. These last items were never mentioned:
they were Airborne weren’t they; they were
tough and knew it. All right: water and
rations didn’t matter — give them some
Germans to kill, and one chance in ten, and
they'd get along somehow.’
At ‘water and rations’ the sound of
Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata creeps in
softly.
13. Camera tracks back from keyboard.
The Appassionata: forte chords on cut.
14. L.S. Platform at a National Gallery concert.
Myra Hess at piano.
Appassionata continues.
15. Appassionata continues through the rest
of this sequence, to shot 27.
16. Poster announcing Fifth Birthday
Concert at the National Gallery.
17. Camera tracks along a row of listening
faces.
18. M.S. Myra Hess at piano. Camera tracks
in to her hands.
94 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Under music BBC commentator’s voice is

faded up, repeating:
*... Luckily or unluckily it rained, and they
caught the water in their capes and drank
that ...’
19. Sudden forte in music precipitates cut.
20. L.S. Another static water tank in London
street.
21. Bombed roofs of London houses.
The voice of Michael Redgrave returns
reading E. M. Forster’s commentary, ‘It’s the
middle of October now...’
Appassionata continuing under commentary.
22. A builder mending slates on a bombed
roof. ‘And the war certainly won’t be over by
Christmas. And the weather doesn’t suit us ...’
23. Another roof mender.
‘And one-third of all our houses have been
damaged by enemy action.’
The sound of the workman’s hammer pierces
the music.
 ONLY CONNECT 95

24. ‘Did you like the music that lady was 28. A miner heaps coal on to a conveyor.
playing? Some of us think it is the greatest ‘Look at the place where Goronwy has to cut
music in the world. Yet it’s German music, coal.’
and we're fighting the Germans.’ At ‘some of The fierce sound of drilling on the cut.
us think ...’ the pianist’s hands are 29. C.S. Dmill.
superimposed over the image of Drilling continues.
roofmenders. 30. ‘And you — all warm and sleepy in your
25. C.U. Pianist’s hands. cot by the fire ...”
“There’s something you'll have to think over The subdued sound of rain trickling down a
later on.” window pane.
26. The wet surface of a road; the legs of a
man leading a pony pass diagonally across
frame. Sound of water trickling merges with
Appassionata. “Rain ... too much rain.’
27. A miner at the coal face.
‘It’s even wet under the earth.’
The Appassionata is lost under the sound of
picking.
HUMPHREY JENNINGS

The latter two of these four films, Fires Were Started and A Diary for
Timothy, are more ambitious in conception: the second runs for about forty
minutes, and the first is a full-length ‘feature-documentary’. One’s opinion as
to which of them is Jennings’s masterpiece is likely to vary according to which
of them one has most recently seen. Fires Were Started (made in 1943) is a
story of one particular unit of the National Fire Service during one particular
day and night in the middle of the London blitz: in the morning the men leave
their homes and civil occupations, their taxi-cabs, newspaper shops,
advertising agencies, to start their tour of duty; a new recruit arrives and is
shown the ropes; warning comes in that a heavy attack is expected; night falls
and the alarms begin to wail; the unit is called out to action at a riverside
warehouse, where fire threatens an ammunition ship drawn up at the wharf;
the fire is mastered; a man is lost; the ship sails with the morning tide. In
outline it is the simplest of pictures; in treatment it is of the greatest subtlety,
richly poetic in feeling, intense with tenderness and admiration for the
unassuming heroes whom it honours. Yet is is not merely the members of the
unit who are given this depth and dignity of treatment. Somehow every
character we see, however briefly, is made to stand out sharply and memorably
in his or her own right: the brisk and cheery girl who arrives with the dawn on
the site of the fire to serve tea to the men from her mobile canteen; a girl in the
control room forced under her desk by a near-miss, and apologising down the
telephone which she still holds in her hand as she picks herself up; two isolated
aircraft-spotters watching the flames of London miles away through the
darkness. 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.
The idea of connection, by contrast and juxtaposition, is always present
in Fires Were Started — never more powerfully than in the beautiful closing
sequence, where the fireman’s sad little funeral is intercut against the
ammunition ship moving off down the river — but its general movement
necessarily conforms to the basis of narrative. A Diary for Timothy, on the
other hand, is constructed entirely to a pattern of relationships and contrasts,
endlessly varying, yet each one contributing to the rounded poetic statement
of the whole. It is a picture of the last year of the war, as it was lived through
 ONLY CONNECT 97

by people in Britain; at the start a baby, Timothy, is born, and it is to him that
the film is addressed. Four representative characters are picked out (if we
except Tim himself and his mother, to both of whom we periodically return):
an engine driver, a farmer, a Welsh miner and a wounded fighter pilot. But the
story is by no means restricted to scenes involving these; with dazzling
virtuosity, linking detail to detail by continuously striking associations of
image, sound, music and comment, the film ranges freely over the life of the
nation, connecting and connecting. National tragedies and personal tragedies,
individual happinesses and particular beauties are woven together in a design
of the utmost complexity: the miner is injured in a fall at the coal face, the
fighter pilot gets better and goes back to his unit, the Arnhem strike fails, Myra
Hess plays Beethoven at the National Gallery, bombs fall over Germany, and
Tim yawns in his cot.
Such an apparently haphazard selection of details could mean nothing or
everything. Some idea of the poetic method by which Jennings gave the whole
picture its continual sense of emotion and significance may perhaps be given
by the sequence analysed and illustrated here, but of course only the film can
really speak for itself. The difficulty of writing about such a film, of
disengaging in the memory the particular images and sounds (sounds
moreover which are constantly overlapping and mixing with each other) from
the overall design has been remarked on by Dilys Powell:
‘It is the general impression which remains; only with an effort do you
separate the part from the whole ... the communication is always through a
multitude of tiny impressions, none in isolation particularly memorable.’
Only with the last point would one disagree. A Diary for Timothy is so
tensely constructed, its progression is so swift and compulsive, its associations
and implications so multifarious, that it is almost impossible, at least for the
first few viewings, to catch and hold on to particular impressions. Yet the
impressions themselves are rarely unmemorable, not merely for their splendid
pictorial quality, but for the intimate and loving observation of people, the
devoted concentration on the gestures and expressions, the details of dress or
behaviour that distinguish each unique human being from another. Not least
among the virtues that distinguish Jennings from almost all British film-
makers is his respect for personality, his freedom from the inhibitions of class-
98 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

consciousness, his inability to patronise or merely to use the people in his

films. Jennings’s people are ends in themselves.

IV
Other films were made by Jennings during the war, and more after it, up to his
tragic death in 1950; but I have chosen to concentrate on what I feel to be his
best work, most valuable to us. He had his theme, which was Britain; and
nothing else could stir him to quite the same response. With more
conventional subjects — The Story of Lili Marlene, A Defeated People, The
Cumberland Story — he was obviously unhappy, and, despite his brilliance at
capturing the drama of real life, the staged sequences in these films do not
suggest that he would have been at ease in the direction of features. The Silent
Village — his reconstruction of the story of Lidice in a Welsh mining village —
bears this out; for all the fond simplicity with which he sets his scene, the
necessary sense of conflict and suffering is missed in his over-refined, under-
dramatised treatment of the essential situation. It may be maintained that
Jennings’s peacetime return to the theme of Britain (The Dim Little Island in
1949, and Family Portrait in 1950) produced work that can stand beside his
wartime achievement, and certainly neither of these two beautifully finished
films is to be dismissed. But they lack passion.
By temperament Jennings was an intellectual artist, perhaps too
intellectual for the cinema. (It is interesting to find Miss Raine reporting that,
‘Julian Trevelyan used to say that Humphrey’s intellect was too brilliant for a
painter.) It needed the hot blast of war to warm him to passion, to quicken his
symbols to emotional as well as intellectual significance. His symbols in
Family Portrait — the Long Man of Wilmington, Beachy Head, the mythical
horse of Newmarket — what do they really mean to us? Exquisitely presented
though it is, the England of those films is nearer the “This England’ of the pre-
war beer advertisements and Mr Castleton Knight’s coronation film than to
the murky and undecided realities of today. For reality, his wartime films stand
alone; and they are sufficient achievement. They will last because they are true
to their time, and because the depth of feeling in them can never fail to
communicate itself. They will speak for us to posterity, saying: ‘This is what
it was like. This is what we were like — the best of us’.
Sight and Sound/ April—June 1954
 ONLY CONNECT 99

Postscript
Since ‘Only Connect’ was published in Sight and Sound in 1954, I have written
several times about Humphrey Jennings. One always hopes — without too
much presumption — that one is helping to keep the work alive. Yet as the years
pass, these films, which should be familiar to every schoolboy and girl in the
country, seem to be seen and known by fewer people. As far as I know, BBC
Television, which in recent years has shown films like The Foreman Went to
France, Angels One Five, The Way to the Stars etc., has practically never shown
a film by Humphrey Jennings in its entirety.” (They commissioned Robert Vas
to make a film about him but the result was, as usual with Robert’s films, as
much about Robert himself as about Jennings. And the extracts from
Jennings’s work could surely not mean a great deal to people who were not
already familiar with it.) Recently, perched on a camera crane waiting for
clouds to pass, I asked the crew how many of them had heard of Humphrey
Jennings. One had. But he could not remember the name of any of his films.
So I am happy that Riverside Studios are mounting this exhibition; that
this book is being prepared; and that ‘Only Connect’ has been chosen for
reprinting. Although it was written nearly thirty years ago, it still reflects
pretty faithfully what I feel. I got into trouble when it was first published, for
saying that Jennings was ‘the only real poet the British cinema has yet
produced’. Lady Elton was particularly annoyed — though, with the exception
of Basil Wright, I cannot see that the British documentary movement
produced any other director who could be called a poet. But then (again with
the exception of Basil) I don’t think the British documentarists ever really
approved of Jennings; certainly they never expressed any enthusiasm for his
work until it was too late. The Griersonian tradition — into which Jennings
only fitted uneasily — was always more preachy and sociological than it was
either political or poetic.
One aspect of Humphrey Jennings’s work I would have to be stricter
about if I were writing today: its last phase. My allusion in this piece to Dim
Little Island and Family Portrait is pussy-footing and unilluminating. Of
course there is distinctive and distinguished compositional style to these films.
But in the end they can be dismissed. In fact they must be. They demonstrate
only too sadly how the traditionalist spirit was unable to adjust itself to the
100 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

changed circumstances of Britain after the war. By the time Jennings made
Family Portrait for the 1951 Festival of Britain, the ‘family’ could only be a
sentimental fiction, inhabiting a Britain dedicated to the status quo. I don’t
know whether Jennings thought of himself as a ‘Leftist’ in the old Mass
Observation days. Traditionalism, after all, does not always have to be equated
with Conservatism. But somehow by the end of the war, Jennings’s
traditionalism had lost any touch of the radical: Spare Time (which is a
beautiful, sharp, bitter-sweet and touching picture) is infinitely more alive than
his academic Family Portrait. He found himself invoking great names of the
past (Darwin, Newton, Faraday and Watt) in an attempt to exorcise the demons
of the present. Even the fantasy of Empire persists (“The crack of the village
bat is heard on Australian plains ...’). The symbol at the end of the film is the
mace of Authority, and its last image is a preposterous procession of ancient
and bewigged dignitaries. The Past is no longer an inspiration: it is a refuge.
But of course whether Humphrey Jennings was able to find the
inspiration in peace that he had in war does not matter. That particular
problem has been ours rather than his for some time now: and we can hardly
claim to have solved it much better. There remain his precious handful of
films. They may not seem directly dedicated to our dilemmas; but they can
still stir and inspire us with their imaginative and moral impulse, they are still
alive (for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear) with that mysterious
oracular power which is the magic property of art. The poetry survives.
October 1981
 More Than a Shadow: Humphrey Jennings
and Stewart McAllister
DAI VAUGHAN

We peer through a doorway to where a man sits hunched over a bench tinkering with
something or other. There is a touch of fairytale or of folklore in the bespectacled glance he
casts up at our intrusion, elfin and tetchy, wizened yet ageless: of a magical watchmaker
surprised at his craft ... What I describe — from memory, and no doubt inaccurately — is a
photograph, taken late in his short life, of Stewart McAllister, editor of London Can Take It,
Heart of Britain, Words for Battle, Listen to Britain, Fires Were Started, The Silent Village,
The Eighty Days, A Family Portrait, probably also Spare Time and possibly S.S. Ionian.

You couldn’t exactly call him Humphrey’s shadow. He had too much substance of his
own for that.
—A former assistant editor

Many of Humphrey Jennings’s admirers employ, tacitly, an argument which

goes roughly as follows: Jennings was a very individual film-maker, in the
sense that his films manifest continuities of theme and iconography some of
which may be traced also in his poems and paintings; therefore his best films
must be the most individual, the most personal. While the premiss of this is
demonstrably true, the conclusion not only does not follow but requires the
disregarding of Jennings’s own testimony: for we must assume him to have
been responsible for the credit of Listen to Britain— arguably his best film, and
widely so regarded — which reads, ‘Directed and edited by Humphrey
Jennings and Stewart McAllister’. It explicitly asserts that this film was not his
most individual but his most collaborative.
102 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

What sort of person was his collaborator? McAllister was seven years
younger than Jennings, having been born in December 1914 in Wishaw,
Lanarkshire. From 1931 to 1936 he attended Glasgow School of Art where,
although showing considerable promise as a painter, he became increasingly
interested in film-making — at that time not an academically reputable
activity — and was a party to the first experiments in direct animation than
being conducted by his fellow-student, Norman McLaren. His fine arts
education co-existed with an interest in science and technology which
evidently, in his later years as associate producer with the British Transport
Film Unit, equipped him well for his dealings with design engineers in the
scripting of films on such subjects as electrification and modernisation of the
railways. Despite the commercial and critical successes of Fires Were Started,
Harry Watt’s Target for Tonight and David MacDonald’s undeservedly
forgotten Men of the Lightship, McAllister was never tempted by the glamour
and financial lures of the features industry, but chose to remain in the field of
nationally sponsored documentary from 1937, when he began work with the
GPO Unit, until his death in 1962. Characteristically, he left behind him a
number of uncompleted electronic devices and two volumes of original
engravings by Blake.
It is clear from this outline how closely in some respects the
preoccupations of McAllister mirror those of Jennings. The surrealism, of
course, is absent; and the social concerns are present not overtly but in the
commitment to documentary, which by all accounts was fierce. The parallel
may nevertheless be close enough to trouble those commentators whose
practice is to invoke an artist’s background, ostensibly in explication of the
work but in fact as an adjunct to it, so that the work may thereby be assimilated
to the artist’s persona. Which artist, if not both?
The contributions of editor and director to a film are not easily
distinguished. To say that the one assembles material whose shooting the other
has overseen does little justice to the intimacy with which two minds may
associate to a common purpose. To the extent that such purpose is by custom
accredited to the director, we may visualise two people standing, one in front
of the other, so that all we see of the further one is that margin which is not
shadowed by the nearer. Acquaintance with those films on which Jennings and
 MORE THAN A SHADOW 103

McAllister worked apart enables us to arrive, after a while, at an intuitive sense

of the latter’s creative personality as consisting in a certain way of connecting
images: a linkage, relying upon a delicate balance between the compositional
and the conceptual, wherein each image may assume a symbolic quality, but of
a transitory symbolism, limited to context and in no way antagonistic to the
shot’s status as witness to the vanished moment. Such a mode of cinematic
thinking offered the ideal articulation for Jennings’s heightened visual
vocabulary: offered, indeed, the means for its elevation to the surreal. Despite
frequent quarrels — of a legendary passion and brevity, and proof enough of
the equality of their dedication — the two worked together whenever they
could; and the films which Jennings made without McAllister, however
striking in conception or felicitous in local detail, seem to lack a crucial
integrative element, as if he had composed them with only one hemisphere of
his brain.
Film benefits little from the solitary creativity wished by Romanticism
upon the painter and the poet. It is entirely to Jennings’s credit that he was able
to recognise this; and it is entirely to the discredit of his admirers that they are
not. If the point were merely one of parochial dispute within the movie
business, there would be no purpose in insisting upon it here. But the
undervaluing of technicians’ contributions in film-making is part of a broader
and deeply political prejudice which, by counterposing only the figure of the
isolated individual against the anonymities of mass society, confirms society
in its assurance that creative collaboration between equals is a chimera. To
approach Jennings through a study of the work of McAllister is to meet him
afresh: not as the divinity behind a body of films whose appearance in the
world is miraculous, but as a man bringing his considerable talents into
harness with those of other people, sometimes succeeding and sometimes
failing, engaging with the problems of a specific historical period and
answering its demand from within the social and aesthetic perspectives of a
movement, and a Unit, of which his own particularity supplied one vital
component. That people should present his films as ‘personal’, in the belief
that they are praising them, is especially ironic: for what these films celebrate
is sometimes the small working group, sometimes the community and
sometimes the nation at large, but never the egregious individual.
104 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

It was after Jennings’s death in 1950 that McAllister allowed himself to

be persuaded to take on the job of producer: but everyone who knew him says
that his heart remained in the cutting room; and everyone seems to agree that,
for all his efforts in this new capacity, he never really ‘found himself’ again. It
would be picturesque to describe him, in these final years, as the desolate
survivor of twins. But that would be an oversimplification. Many things had
changed in the pattern of government sponsorship since the days of London
Can Take It, when by a fluke of providence documentary had attained, with
its language newly forged, to a unique position of public trust. Genius, after
all, is not the whole story. Had documentary at the outbreak of war been:much
older and consolidated, or much younger and unprepared, then its great
achievements, including those of Jennings and McAllister, would not have
been possible.
McAllister’s influence persists in a curious form, extending well beyond
the circle of those who have heard of him, enshrined in a stock of procedures,
habits of mind passed from editor to assistant, a mode of approach to the
work. In the Presbyterian church at Wishaw he is commemorated by a stained
glass window which bears, over an eagle rising from a thicket of spears, the
inscription, ‘I will not cease from mental fight.’ It is, of course, a quotation
from Blake’s Jerusalem. It is also a quotation from Words for Battle.
 Sketch for an Historical Portrait of
Humphrey Jennings
DAVID MELLOR

Introduction
The work and career of Humphrey Jennings represent a formidable challenge
to the as yet unwritten history of modernism in Britain. Known to the general
public mainly as a documentary film-maker, Jennings was an artist in many
other fields as well, both before and after the watershed of the Second World
War. He was a painter (and theorist of modern painting), an experimental
photographer, a poet, and intellectual historian, and one of the founders of
Mass Observation. Perhaps most importantly of all, he was a practitioner of
what has since come to be called intertextuality, reworking and transforming
the same material — often beginning with an odjet trouvé — through various
forms and media. Although his diverse career might suggest dilettantism, it
was in fact extraordinarily coherent, with each artistic practice in which he was
engaged reinforcing and playing off the others. But this coherence was not
without its contradictions — contradictions inherent in any modernist project
in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. These contradictions were a condition of
Jennings’s extraordinary productivity as an experimenter, tirelessly finding
paths through the morass of contemporary British culture, and of his
subsequent eclipse. His work is now hardly known in any detail, or is known
only outside the context that made it so productive. This essay aims to restore
and reconstruct some of the context of that work and in particular the relation
of his work to modernism in Britain. Just as Jennings audaciously constructed
a set of scenographic and poetic variations to reconstellate British culture, so
the received map of British modernism (particularly in the region of painting)
must be reconstructed to reinsert Jennings’s forceful efforts within that period.
106 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Within the confines of this introductory essay I can only hope to sketch the
outlines of such a project, hoping thereby however to prepare the ground for
a full account of Jennings’s differential specificity within British modernism.
I shall examine, necessarily schematically, six moments in Jennings’s
development, overlapping with the biographical chronology provided by
Marie-Louise Jennings to accompany the documentation about his career
elsewhere in this book. My schema begins (1.) with his position up to 1930, and
follows (2.) his transformation through his encounter with pictorial modernism
between 1930 and 1933, (3.) his change of status and recruitment into
documentary film-making in 1934, (4.) the complex moment around Mass
Observation, (5.) his filmic Gesamtkunstwerke of the Second World War, and
finally (6.) his return to the primacy of painting and to pre- and post-industrial
landscapes in the late 1940s. It is also hoped that this chronological succession
will not mask the traces of the interaction and continuity of many authorial
drives and motifs latent in what I shall call the Jennings-text: that group of
paintings, films, poems and photographs spanning the period from 1930 to 1950.

1. From Antiquarianism to the Signifier as Content

A constant determination in the Jennings-text was his particular notion of
inter-media linkages and polysemy. In this critical perception he was shaped
by the innovative teaching of English literature at Cambridge by I. A.
Richards and by the patrimony of that eclectic synaesthesia found in the Arts
and Crafts movement in which both his parents were lodged. The allusions of
emblems, decorative symbols and devices, and of scholarly reflexiveness over
style and motif in drama and poetry, were all well imprinted on Jennings by
the end of the 1920s. That endless ambiguous play of signifiers within a poem
or painting that would so characterise his later work was first seeded within a
framework of antiquarianism and concern with incunabula. It was within this
structure that he found the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge with its gigantic
assemblage of paintings and objects so suggestive — he symptomatically
described it as a ‘glorious mix-up’. This is revealing: for he perceived a
transcendent (‘glorious’) cultural assemblage which acted like an irritant on his
critical antiquarianism, constantly juxtaposing different historical modes.
Jennings the dricoleur of the 1930s and 1940s can here be seen in formation,
 SKETCH FOR AN HISTORICAL PORTRAIT OF HUMPHREY JENNINGS 107

while he shared in Richards’s and his fellow-student William Empson’s

rediscovery of rhetorical, literary and dramatic devices — pastorals, triumphs
and elegies. He began too his meditation on the historical roles of poets who
had practised these forms — the private rentier poet such as Thomas Gray (his
doctoral subject), or the state panegyrist or martial laureate. He visited Rome
in 1928 and, as the decade closed, made contact with the international neo-
classicism of the period. It was a saturating style which, via Bloomsbury, had
its outpost in Cambridge. Jennings collaborated with Lydia Lopokova, wife of
John Maynard Keynes, ona production of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, and
came under the influence of the painting of Duncan Grant, which had been
hailed in the 1920s by Roger Fry for its ‘Elizabethan’ wittiness and had already
encompassed Picasso’s neo-classicism. Grant’s style was manipulated by
Jennings for two ends: scenographically, in his stage designs and paintings of
Harlequins (stock items of neo-classicism), and for lyrical landscape paintings
of Suffolk and Essex barns and fields. He began to engage actively with the
problems of style-conscious reflexiveness, remaking Gainsborough and
Constable motifs according to the codes of Matisse and Grant.

Photograph with portrait of Byron/MLJ

108 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

But it was theatrical scenography that mainly preoccupied him as a

painter: he was a scene designer for pageants and operas, which provided the
site for his first inter-media experiment. Meanwhile his reflexiveness over style
led him to a point, about 1930, when the scenic backdrops and props, and their
signifying codes, became objects for his smaller private paintings. Pictorial
play with different scenery painting techniques and their artifice had
marginally interested Sickert in his spatial experiments with point of view in
his theatre paintings, but to configure a painting exclusively around the
discourses of scenography was something novel; it was a kind of meta-
painting which had, perhaps, its nearest point of reference in contemporary
paintings by Ben Nicholson. Nicholson’s paintings also dealt with signifiers as
content, though in his case the signifiers were drawn from the source of
Parisian natures-mortes - a genre which, twenty years later, Jennings was to
interrogate and deconstruct as part of an attempt to Anglicise modernist
iconography.

2. Modernism and the Re-Representation of History

Already familiar with the Parisian avant-garde through the arts and letters
magazines Transition and Cahiers d'Art, Jennings had first-hand contact with
modernism in Paris when he attempted to live there, intermittently, in 1930
and 1931. His stays radically recast his sensibility into Surrealist categories. He
wrote from Paris in September 1931. ‘I already feel utterly different about
painting, more concentrated and excited and more myself ... as I used to feel
about scenery’. In Surrealism and post-Cubist painting generally he found an
alternative to the arcane codes of neo-classicism. He hoped, ideologically, that
a modernist system of proportions, a new spatial system and refurbished
iconography would restore a ‘Rubens-like heroism’. That cultural criterion of
the heroic became a significant goal for Jennings, but revealed a contradiction.
As an unreconstructed antiquarian he accepted the patriarchal authority of
classical origins, refusing to relinquish them and indeed affirming them in his
1936 critique of the weaknesses inherent in British Surrealism. On the other
hand his writings on art in 1931 swept aside the preceding, first generation of
modernism, proclaiming Cubism already dead for six years. Justifying this
moment of break, he wrote, ‘Freedom had to be regained’, an aim he
 SKETCH FOR AN HISTORICAL PORTRAIT OF HUMPHREY JENNINGS

envisaged being implemented by the ‘jeune peinture’, with Masson, Borés,

Cossio, Roux and Miré prominent in their ranks.
In the place of the monochrome, formal, rectilinear and wedge-like
compositions of Cubism, the new space initiated by Miré was polychrome,
fluid, ambiguous: it gave directly on to fantasy projections and the multiple
play of signifiers. It was perhaps Mir6é who wrought the most drastic shift in
Jennings’s pictorial codes. Mird’s Circus Horse series of 1926-27 did not just
happen to refer to one of Jennings’s preferred icons, the horse, but
resanctioned the representation of personal mythologies, a zone excluded
from Cubism. Jennings, in his photographs of the late 1930s, attempted
various anamorphic and collage reworkings of his own horse paintings. But
Mird’s major contribution to the Jennings-text was to provide an open licence
for visual pastiche and transcription, an opportunity to re-represent historical
images again, now figured by modernist pictorial codes. In his /maginary
Portraits of 1929 Miré had treated paintings by Raphael and by 17th-century
Dutch masters and a Georgian portrait of 1750 as signifiers to be modernised.
This provided Jennings with a rationale for painting Guy Fawkes, Karl Marx,
Charles Darwin and William Morris — historically resonant British or adopted
British personages — in a mode that surpassed the previous code for such
representations, prising them from the tonal, juste-milieu, academic,
naturalistic style that had been stabilised since the end of the 19th century. In
its place Jennings introduced the polychrome, fluid constructs of Miré, Dali
and Masson. His pronounced antiquarianism and modernism could, by 1932,
be yoked together. Surrealism had now repopulated painting and legislated
myth as viable content. The corollary of his discovery of Surrealism and its
methods of dream transcription and automatism was, of course, a
comprehensive reading of Freud, which he seems to have undertaken from
1932 and was still engaged on in 1938.

3. Documentary Film as the ‘Magnificent System’

Up to 1934 Jennings had been attempting, unsuccessfully, to establish himself
as an artist — an Edwardian rebel artist, he fantasised, like Galsworthy’s
Jolyon — and working on his doctorate. As one of the editors, along with
Empson and Bronowski, of the magazine Experiment, Jennings had
110 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

reproduced two abstract paintings by a young French artist who was studying
English literature at Cambridge in 1929, Henri Cartier-Bresson. In contrast,
by 1934, Cartier-Bresson had become one of the leading exponents of candid
realist reportage, using a Leica still camera loaded with adapted film stock. A
new realism, supported, strengthened and broadened by the new photo-
mechanical technologies, was to become, along with Surrealism, one of the
leading issues on the modernist agenda by the mid-1930s. Defections and
transits across the pictorial media, from painting into photography and film,
became a conspicuous feature of the cultural map. These tendencies were
intensified by the Depression, which, among its other effects, all but destroyed
the market for modernist painting. There were therefore distinct economic
reasons which drove painters (like William Coldstream) into the GPO Film
Unit and other governmental or commercial agencies. It was the proffered
shelter of a regular wage that finally induced Jennings to join a profession that
he had expressly rejected a few years earlier. ‘I should hate doing films really
... simply I want to draw,’ he had written in a letter to his wife Cicely in 1929.
One of his first working contacts at the GPO Film Unit — his
apprenticeship, in fact — was with Alberto Cavalcanti, who had an extensive
background in Parisian Surrealism. Indeed, as it was mediated to many British
artists, Surrealism appeared to be pre-eminently a film form. Bunuel’s Un
Chien andalou and L’Age dor had a determining impact on the British
documentarist photographer Bill Brandt, for example. Jennings’s transition
and change of status was not unusual, but it was to effect a marked
displacement in his work, in the Jennings-text. For around 1934-36 corporate
mega-visual forms, especially documentary — representations for the newly
emerging corporate agencies such as the GPO, Shell, BP, Milk Marketing
Board, London Transport, etc — appeared to be increasingly occupying a new
central ground in pictorial practice, marginalising the more traditional manual
art media and their private functions. In effect, and paradoxically, his new role
returned him to his earlier, scholarly concerns with the classical rhetorics of
public address and spectacle — the triumph and elegy — but now inflected
within a populist frame. His absorption into the GPO affected the non-visual
areas of his production. It was from the same date, 1934, that he also began to
extend Imagist poetic forms, familiar from childhood reading of his parents’
 SKETCH FOR AN HISTORICAL PORTRAIT OF HUMPHREY JENNINGS

copies of The New Age, through the adoption of journalistic-documentarist-

reportage models. ‘The new experimental formats of ‘Reports’ and ‘Popular
Narratives’ depended on objectified word-collages, very often modified
Surrealist narratives enunciated through the persona of a mock 18th-century
mandarin or encyclopaedist, an inventor of History as well as its recorder.
The dominance of ‘camera reality’, of the sachlich record as a possible
object of fantasy, was now paramount in the Jennings-text. Camera reality, he
had come to believe, had utterly outstripped and marginalised certain
established poetic roles and postures. For future Coronations, he wrote, the
poet laureate might only make shift by ‘making an analysis of [the] emotion
[of] the camera photographs’ of the procession and ceremony. Meanwhile the
structure of pictorial production which he entered had developed its own, pre-
existing type of filmic lyrical pastoral — as for example in one of the first GPO
films he saw on induction in 1934, Evelyn Spice’s Spring on the Farm. Within
the Jennings-text a self-definition of his new methods was forming. It lay at
the intersection of his consciousness of the photo-mechanical nature of the
mass media, of the still operative Surrealist categories of the odjet trouvé and
the ready-made (the Duchampian object of labour and use transformed into
object of art display), and of the cinematic technique of cutting and montage
(which may have represented for Jennings the final hypertrophy of Cubism).
Combined with his perpetual allegiance to the activity of English literary
criticism, these concepts produced an obsessive image, a mock-archaic and
transcendental object — a Benjaminesque notion of Documentary as the
‘magnificent system’. He elaborated this in his poem, or ‘Report’, The
Boyhood of Byron: “The labours of the antiquary, the verbal critic, the collator
of mouldering manuscripts, may be preparing the way for the achievements of
some splendid genius, who may combine their minute details into some
magnificent system, or evolve from a multitude of particulars some general
principle, destined to illuminate the career of future ages’.

4. Towards the Poet-Reporter and Mass Observation

Aside from the evocation in The Boyhood of Byron of the projective camera
obscura, prototype of the camera, the image of illumination, and more
importantly the illuminator, plays a central part in the Jennings-text from 1934
we HUMPHREY JENNINGS

onwards. It is an image which has 18th-century connotations, rooted in the

reforming intellectual elite of the Enlightenment. Such a role, in Britain in the
1930s and 1940s, was coveted by Grierson and many of the documentarists. ‘Is
it possible,’ one of them wrote, ‘that the business of national education is
passing, by default, from the offices of Whitehall to the Public Relations
departments of the great corporations?’
In the Jennings-text from the late 1930s, light discloses truth, or is
decomposed and, in splitting or in recomposition through a prism, reveals
colour. There recurs a symbolic opposition between greyness (associated with
funereality and the industrial landscape) and colour as a productive force. In
his poem As the Sun, the patriarchal incarnation of the sun places a prohibition
on the sight of colour. Nature, in As the Sun and in Peacock Coal, suffers
neutralisation, a repression of colour, which, in the latter poem, is enforced by
the patriarchs of the Industrial Revolution itself. This process is then in turn
negated by industrial labour. In Jennings’s system of symbolic substitutions,
colour is eventually recovered from the industrial masses during war time and
under the Attlee government: communalism and populism act as the new
organisational prisms that release the ‘prismatic radiance of humanity’ in a
painting like Canteen (1944), a polychrome reworking of a scene from Listen
to Britain further reworked in 1949.

Listen to Britain: Flanagan and Allen; Painting (c.1949) from a photograph probably of
the Flanagan and Allen audience/JD102
 SKETCH FOR AN HISTORICAL PORTRAIT OF HUMPHREY JENNINGS AS

In 1936 the symbolic order of British society was on the verge of

breaking up, or so it seemed to Jennings, in his meditations on the deathliness
inherent in the ‘ghostly’ black and white film of George V’s funeral. It seemed
So, too, to other journalists who came together to form the Mass Observation
organisation. The year began with the passing of George V, the national
patriarch, and continued with the removal through abdication of another
monarch, Edward VIII, and the substitution of a third, George VI. A great
national monument, the Crystal Palace, was destroyed by fire in the same
year. In Europe this was the year of the Popular Front in France, but also of
Franco’s assault, backed by Germany and Italy, against the Spanish Republic.
But it was with strictly national portents and omens that Tom Harrisson and
Charles Madge were concerned when they joined with Jennings at the
beginning of 1937 to found Mass Observation, inviting, through the columns
of the Daily Mirror and New Statesman, mass participation in a project to
describe everyday life in Britain. By co-ordinating the results of
questionnaires about recollected dreams, habits, prejudices, wishes and
daydreams, the leaders of Mass Observation hoped — clearly on a Freudian
model — to examine a collective discourse and to analyse and diagnose a
society whose channels of communication seemed pathologically blocked.
Jennings’s only major publication was constructed out of his
arrangement of Mass Observation responses to inquiries into private and
public behaviour during the coronation of George VI on 12 May 1937. In his
report on his own behaviour that day (he photographed crowds watching the
Coronation in the Mall, not far from where — as it happened — Cartier-Bresson
was also photographing) he revealed his fascination with the paraphernalia of
the newest of all the mass media — television, fully deployed for the first time
for that event. With his collage/reportage documentary book, May 12th,
Jennings’s ‘magnificent system’ became a gigantic concordance of texts held
in place by the realist-documentarist device of one (special-yet-ordinary)
day’s time elapsing — a favourite rhetorical form of photo-magazine reportage
in the 1930s and 1940s, and previously pioneered in film by Cavalcanti,
Ruttmann and Vertov. The synchronous texts were sifted by Jennings as
solicited testimonies that might reveal the latent significations of a British
unconsciousness, an endless palimpsest written on and over by many but co-
Wiles HUMPHREY JENNINGS

ordinated by one. Pursuing this vein of democratic Surrealism (somewhat in

the mode of the early, quasi-bureaucratic Surréaliste Centrale) Jennings wrote
on the mass psychology of the snapshot in terms that, more precisely, recall
the independent but parallel notion in Walter Benjamin of an optical,
photographic unconsciousness. Jennings also practised a self-analysis of his
own ‘art’ discourse, mapping the associations that he could trace in his work
between a multiplicity of displacements of ideas and images, both pictorial
and scriptural. The resulting ‘map’ (reproduced on p. 28), in conjunction with
his paintings and a poem of the same date entitled The Origin of Colour, offers
a part-key to the state of the Jennings-text as of 1937.
Despite a public admonition by Paul Nougé against the use of Freud’s
own reductionist forays into sociology, Jennings’s interest in the social
applications of certain Freudian extensions of Surrealism (such as attempting to
read off a kind of urban unconsciousness from news headlines, advertisements
and shop windows) intensified after his intimacy with Breton, Eluard and
Duchamp in 1936—38. Along with Breton and Roland Penrose he organised the
International Surrealist Exhibition in London in June 1936. One of his
contributions was a collage-satire of Kitchener, the venerated military leader of
the Great War, represented by Jennings as a minotaur — a contribution which
provoked a minor news scandal in the conservative Daily Mail.
One guise which reconciled the twin demands of the Surrealist and the
Documentarist was that of the Poet-Reporter. In his BBC broadcasts in 1938
on the general theme of ‘Poetry and the Public’, Jennings posited a unity
which had once existed in English Literature, before the advent of the mass
media, in which ‘the poet was a kind of reporter’; and ‘poet-reporter’ was in
fact the title adopted by Charles Madge during these years, echoing the
utopian hopes of Mass Observation to have reconciled science and art after
their separation brought about by the Industrial Revolution. It was also
Madge, then a Marxist-Leninist, who provided Jennings with the ‘text’ for one
of his fullest and most significant photographs, ‘Daily Worker’ (1937), by
discussing with him Lenin’s theory of human labour inscribed into the
production of a manufactured object like a table. Like much of the Jennings-
text, this photograph is concerned with the re-representation of an historical
fragment — in this case a copy of the Communist newspaper represented as a
 i%
seek. hy . ia

His work lives

and triumphs
r % lia

derelicted discarded emblem whose positioning in the picture undercuts the

optimism of the triumphal headline and portrait.
Although he kept his distance from the Communist orthodoxies of the
late 1930s, the reform programme of the Popular Front government in France
did interest him, particularly its introduction of paid holidays and a shorter
working week. (He was briefly in Paris in 1937 to visit the Exposition in
company with his patron Peggy Guggenheim, and it was on this occasion that
he also first made the acquaintance of Duchamp.) Patterns of working-class
leisure were a central concern of Mass Observation. The documentarist
photographer Humphrey Spender, who, like Charles Madge, worked as a
reporter for the Daily Mirror, recorded the Wakes Week in Blackpool for Mass
Observation in 1937. Jennings took up this theme in his film Spare Time
(1939), which was partly set in Bolton (where Tom Harrisson was based). In
this film leisure is represented as a narrow time-corridor of gratification in
industrial society ‘as things now stand’. Pigeon-fancying, darts and football
are presided over by a statue of Richard Cobden, the personification of liberal

‘Daily Worker’ (1937)/JD62

116 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

capitalist ideology. This pictorial motif of the presence of industry and

patriarchy embodied as a statue Jennings had derived from the proto-surrealist
iconography of Giorgio De Chirico, a potent influence also on Bill Brandt’s
contemporary documentary photographs of northern industrial towns.
Another scandal was precipitated by the film among Jennings’s
colleagues in the documentary movement by its depiction of the signs of a
mass popular culture in a sachlich, unpicturesque manner. Prior to the
conscious elaboration of Pop Art by the Independent Group at the ICA in the
mid-1950s, Spare Time offered perhaps the strongest concentration of pop
iconography in any work by a British artist — comic books, pop songs,
football-pool advertisements. Alongside its candid, Spenderesque view of the
factuality of industrial leisure, the crucial novelty about the film was the way
it revolved about the exploration of the signifiers of pop culture, areas that
would provide the site for the work of the pop painters of the 1950s and early
1960s in London, while in other respects it looks forward even further to the
intertextual pictorial projects of R. B. Kitaj in the 1960s and 1970s.

Statue of Richard Cobden (formerly in Peel Park, Salford), from Spare Time
 SKETCH FOR AN HISTORICAL PORTRAIT OF HUMPHREY JENNINGS 117

5. Orchestration and Scenography of the National Patriotic War

One of the features of the Jennings-text during the Second World War is the
heightened tension between the signifiers of high and pop mass culture,
especially through the coding of music on his film soundtracks. This extended
the juxtaposition of baroque music and dance-band and kazoo music already
present in Spare Time. Music becomes the dominant organising category of
the films and poems, the matrix through which the signifying elements of
Britain at War became, as he noted in a written outline for Listen to Britain,
‘all one symphony’. His assemblage format, the ‘magnificent system’, was
shifting towards a kind of synaesthesia, a kind of filmic Gesamtkunstwerk, a
documentarist-baroque in which the rhetorical modes of Pageants, Triumphs
and Masques could be remobilised under the ideological aegis of the
Churchillian renaissance. The poets had, he wrote, once more learned to be
patriotic. So had film-makers, as the presence of the Pageant or Triumph in
contemporary films by Powell and Pressburger bears witness.
The crisis of ideological institutions at the end of the 1930s — the crisis
that had brought Mass Observation into existence — was halted abruptly with
the fall of France and a new symbolic order emerged. The new ideological
configuration is signified and reproduced in the chaotic assemblage of
aristocratic paraphernalia mixed with functional populist Ones in the pageant
of Dressing Station 76 in Listen to Britain (1942), where a baroque statue of
Charles I mingles with the steel helmets of the ambulance crews.
The paternal, communitarian systems of the Commonwealth Party, as
much as those of Beveridge or even Churchill, fell back on the rhetoric and
discourse of a moralising, classicising English Literature. Jennings’s scholarly
enquiries ten years earlier into the role of the martial laureates could now be
enacted. The split role of the poet reporter was discarded for the return of the
martial laureate; the sense of the Heroic Renaissance that he had sought in
post-Cubist art, with its additive, free space and revived mythologies, was
transposed in his 1943-44 poem / Saw Harlequin, which juxtaposes the dance
of Harlequin to the advance of the Red Army on the eastern front.
(Accompanying British Commandos on the first assault wave on Sicily in
1943, Jennings wrote of them in terms of artist-warriors.) The cultural
plurality of the wartime totality was summed up by Jennings as the paradox of
118 HUMPHREY JENNIN

Listen to Britain: Dressing Station 76

 SKETCH FOR AN HISTORICAL PORTRAIT OF HUMPHREY JENNINGS 119

the recombined nation: “When everybody is in uniform, nobody is; just as

punishment creates crime, so also restriction creates freedom’. The lyrical
natural landscape of the Jennings-text of the 1930s, neutralised through the
deformation of the Industrial revolution, became in the 1940s a signifier of
renewed plenitude, absorbing into itself the martial emblems of fighter
aircraft and ack-ack guns amongst skyscapes and trees. In one (unrealised)
film treatment, Spitfires and Hurricanes became thoroughly naturalised as
part of landscape, with a Suffolk farmworker suggesting, in a monologue, that
the warplanes no longer disturbed bird life in the countryside — indeed they
looked like partridges.

6. From the ‘Invention of History’ to the ‘Amenity of Landscape’

In the post-war years the Jennings-text, far from losing impetus, being beset
by anxiety or losing direction (as is sometimes alleged), is constructed by a
new series of meanings. The recombination through the wartime patriarch is
followed by the new order installed by the 1945-50 Labour government. In
The Cumberland Story (1947) productive effort and labour are redeemed
within a Utopian Socialist perspective. In an untitled poem written in 1947-48
Jennings viewed the industrial vista, concentrating on the labour that had
produced it, and celebrated the possibility that the complex of building and
production could be matched by the signifying marks and gestures of painting.
The signifiers of labour are dissolved back into the townscape:

Not one of the things done

Not one man whose cunning produced the littlest piece of what I see in the whole
But is represented by some stroke of brush, flake of snow, speck of soot
In a picture of how many million touches.

Beginning in the 1930s and carrying on through the 1940s Jennings had
collected and collaged together texts on the development of the Industrial
Revolution and its impact on the ‘mentalities’ of the 18th and 19th centuries,
all for an uncompleted mega-text, like May 12th, to have been titled
Pandaemonium — its name indicating its many-layered palimpsest of voices.
But as the 1940s progressed, Jennings — who had never associated himself with
120 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

the ideologies of triumphant managerial technocracy which flourished both

before and after the war — came more and more to assert the values of a post-
industrial symbolic order of Utopian Socialism. His models were Robert
Owen, William Cobbett and William Morris. A poem of 1941 contrasts
present-day Lanark with the Utopian community of New Lanark founded by
Owen in the early 19th century, while in 1947 Jennings describes his politics as
‘those of William Cobbett’. He painted ‘Imaginary Portraits’ of Morris,
whose image also appears in his last film, Family Portrait. In this, the era of the
New Towns movement, it could easily have seemed to him that many of the

Burmese photograph (1947)/MLJ

 SKETCH FOR AN HISTORICAL PORTRAIT OF HUMPHREY JENNINGS

ideas of the Arts and Crafts movement with which he had grown up, were
coming to fulfilment. He also visited pre-industrial Burma shortly after the
war, recording its ceremonies and customs for a film treatment, and his
observation of the still colonial East makes a striking contrast with the
contemporary reportage of Cartier-Bresson in South-East Asia and
Nationalist China just before its collapse.
Pastoral was still the operative category, however, and through much of
the late 1940s his effort was redirected towards painted versions inside this
genre. Post-Cubist modernist landscape had also been the site of pictorial
work by Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash in the 1930s and 1940s. They had
endeavoured to disclose a specifically national Heimat, a British counterpart
to the painted locations of international modernism — the South of France for
example. This procedure of substituting national cultural signifiers for
foreign or cosmopolitan ones was present in the Jennings-text of the late
1940s. In his paintings and poems of the time, the plough, and more
particularly its shadow, bears the symbolic capacity to match and replace the
guitar in the iconography of modernism. There may have been residual traces
of Jennings’s fascination with Duchamp’s machinism in his elevation of the
plough to iconic status, particularly given the key role that shadows of objects
play in Duchamp’s aesthetic. In his poem La Charrue (The Plough), which he
may have addressed directly to Eluard or Breton, Jennings insists that ‘the
plough is the English guitar’. In another variant of the poem, his attempted
system of national iconographic displacement is more explicit:

For the guitar’s plane, the plough

In the plate’s place, the wheel
In the wine’s wheat ...

And he carries on, cancelling out the signifiers of Parisian modernist nazure
morte (wallpaper, tablecloth, bottles etc.) with more signifiers, like windmills,
drawn from the repertory of the (British) landscape. ‘So to assemble the still
life and the Suffolk scene.’
122 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Photograph of ox and plough from Jennings’s papers; Horse and

plough (c.1948)
Notes

1. Charles Laughton played the title roles in Ruggles of Red Gap (Leo McCarey, 1935),
Rembrandt (Alexander Korda, 1936) and The Beachcomber (alias Vessel of Wrath, Erich
Pommer, 1938).
2. From ‘Le Cygne’ (1859), by Charles Baudelaire.
3. “When we admire the sunset we are using the eyes of Turner, when we switch on the
light we are tapping the mind of Faraday’. That is a sentence from the script of Family
Portrait.
4. John Rickman, “The Development of Psychological Medicine’, British Medical
Journal, 7 January 1950, “Whether that inner labour results in anything which is socially
applauded or has social uses varies with each individual. But, useful or not socially, it is a
source of gratification to the individual it gives, if it is in low degree, that meed of
pleasure without which mental life of human standard seems not to operate; when in
high degree, it gives that rare sweeping “oceanic” exultation of spirit and creative
ecstasy which the artists, of all men, can best communicate to their fellows’.
5. Listen to Britain was shown on the BBC in 1946.
Filmography

Post Haste (1934)

PRODUCTION COMPANY.............. GPO Film Unit
PRODUCERMix. 22..0.0ssssessceessecces-co John Grierson
WIRE
CT OR sia costes scocesusir ommenntects Humphrey Jennings
LENG UH. cceesscenssscsecvsssessensssuseseess 10 minutes

Pett and Pott (1934)

PRODUCTION COMPANY ............... GPO Film Unit
PRODUCERS vrsensiee cwccoarcesestostreterects John Grierson
DIRECTOR/SCRIPT/ WRITER/EDITOR.....A. Cavalcanti
ASSOCIATE DIRECTORS ....s+sssesee: Basil Wright, Stuart Legg
SENS Ser cxcst tee Bsetancnese=ccccreraes
ane aheHumphrey Jennings
SOUND REGORDING i orctree-c.s2seces John Cox
MUSIC ren snaveneasevessasnauseecseavenccnce
teenWalter Leigh
DEN GD .csesnccsesesusesssesteeessecnssessasens 33 minutes

Locomotives (1934)
PRODUCTION COMPANY .............. GPO Film Unit
DIRECTOR 'snhessstsasecasteacestetathennatens Humphrey Jennings
MUSIGAT: DIRE CiTONjescssesereneeJohn Foulds
IVES LG 25 coicetes nace ree eee eee Schubert, arr. Foulds
DEIN
G TM ro weaxee socccessaceenees
cece ce eee 10 minutes
 FILMOGRAPHY W455)

The Story of the Wheel (1934)

PRODUCTION COMPANY............... GPO Film Unit
ADRO RU arse seesea See eaceok. cose sons Wace Humphrey Jennings
DRSBUIN GED eeet ce cones sce cscasecnssene-sucsneoe 12 minutes

The Birth of the Robot (1936)

PRODUCTION COMPANY.............+5 Shell-Mex BP
PRODUCER/DIRECTOR.......:+e+0+++ Len Lye
SCRUB Vege vase atoe scenecte oe ease ose eceeseae C. H. David
PH OMOGRARH Yim aseseeseeessearreeeAlex Strasser
COLOUR DECOR AND PRODUCTION ...Humphrey Jennings
MODE ccsvcccatssecesecsasecssssseensccocsees John Banting, Alan Fanner
SOUND RECORDING jic.ce--cesence-cocce Jack Ellit
NILDSS{ex see ee enn ye eee rate Gustav Holst
WEIN
GG DER 20 vcvosbeseasnccsdeceacdevecetesssenes 7 minutes
Gasparcolor

Penny Journey (1938)

PRODUCTION COMPANY .............. GPO Film Unit
ERECTOR jeeectcerccactesseeceerce eecesstenaes Humphrey Jennings
PHOTOGRAPHY cok steses-sevetsocesssezaes> H. E. (Chick) Fowle, W. B. Pollard
TUSSN CANS Bec is cee cen ecereeencnoas
roc oonance 8 minutes

Design for Spring (1938)

PMS TRABUT OR Seesiesoacese-toeactaencetteoer ABFD Dufaycolor
UTA 0 0) | ER a nearer Feces Humphrey Jennings
TING AA ne cee ererearenecenacecessessnossnseae 20 minutes
Made with the dress designer Norman Hartnell

Speaking from America (1938)

PRODUCTION COMPANY..........--+++ GPO Film Unit
BODOEE orien cocrccsn cent tecnres-n--aewewe A. Cavalcanti
DEE CONE oe aeicesge sanceeseHumphrey Jennings
baneseperhergzor
126 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

PH OTOGRAPHY trccceeectteecesenesaeesee-se W. B. Pollard, Fred Gamage

COMME NITDAUO Rewccreesesececerceeete Robin Duff
DIAGRAMS caveccesccseeucses+s-anectecenestetes J. Chambers
GO UINID ecsesess csapcasnce eee eee eee es Ken Cameron
BEING TAN coc cietorsococes osesttcesesteres meres 10 minutes

Spare Time (1939)

(Working title: British Workers)
PRODUCTION COMPANY.............. GPO Film Unit
PRODUCER ia: t.cctesscssesct
svesccavscscees A. Cavalcanti
DIRECTOR/SCRIPTWRITER......... Humphrey Jennings
ASSISTANT DIREC TOR 2 2eiecsesce-se-e D. V. Knight
PHOTOGRAPH Yicc.cscctseecesscosesvadcee Chick Fowle
COMMIENTTATORoc sceeeeeseccwc-oassusesee=e Laurie Lee
SOUINID xscdesatees
eaceecaen catesteatteneae eesYorke Scarlett
NTU SEG 5 eo ete actecdervectescestcesvencees Steel, Peach and Tozer Phoenix Works Band,
Manchester Victorians’ Carnival Band, Handel
Male Voice Choir
MEEING
PH vecsistoncessosce: Mescscavevscesseteees 18 minutes

The First Days (1939)

(Alternative title: 4 City Prepares)
PRODUCTION COMPANY .............. GPO Film Unit/ ABPC
PROD
U CERI teeescereseses
er-tecteccenectcecs A. Cavalcanti
DIR EG TORS wracensusasc¢-nsatsvnesensoterenues Humphrey Jennings, Harry Watt, Pat Jackson
EDIT ORL citsacrectcns cesssso eee R. Q. McNaughton
(EO IMIMIEINTINAIRVietonce se ccrare tac eeceeeeet Robert Sinclair
DUBIN
G WE est.,aucrasocessceastcentercereaveecere 23 minutes

English Harvest (1939)

DIRECTOR ty.ceeaxtibaceaesccoc
os treeet Humphrey Jennings
ILEIN
Gi Eligecwssecr svaevnctet ecctusnesss-ecseeees 9 minutes
Dufaycolor
 FILMOGRAPHY 127

S.S. Ionian (1939)

(Alternative title: Her Last Trip)
PRODUCTION COMPANY............... GPO Film Unit
1BIDLU CANO) 86tee ieee
ne eee Humphrey Jennings
LIBIN GLU eicoccessaccavoreteeeeee
eeae oe20 minutes

Spring Offensive (1940)

(Alternative title: 4n Unrecorded Victory)
PRODUCTION GOMPANY &zc2s0.202-s GPO Film Unit
PRODUCER Se 2s oe eee A. Cavalcanti
DERE GO Roo asrsc sete ese cossseaseeHumphrey Jennings
RE OTOGRARH Verereere
cae tccscectee Chick Fowle, Eric Cross
SCR
UD ee ener eee eee Hugh Gray
WRITER OF COMMENTARY........... A. G. Street
EYBESTGINGPeers 200 oes oes bdossvsepucwweses
oeEdward Carrick
BDID ORS ee Set as ee Geoff Foot
SOUND 2 ye leaseee Ken Cameron
TEIN Gs 5oo vest esnccceceocusboneeedosecemerereee 20 minutes

Welfare of the Workers (1940)

PRODUCTION COMPANY.........0005 GPO Film Unit for the Ministry of Information
PRODUCER cose vestraensosttescseossveers: Harry Watt
1B)UaWElCaKO 13eeereemeyp eeee Comet Humphrey Jennings
PHOTOGRAPHYe cnccssctoosisns-seaessee> Jonah Jones
BD [ROR pees. tsccssectseseosee.
eee nee Jack Lee
S OUWINID eas cates tecoscesuknoesciecoseeee Ken Cameron
COMDIIN TA BY -sees.ecuxosconseanchansen
costaeRitchie Calder
TEIN
(GAINS cory eeceaserep ethene ocepoa aac ee 10 minutes

London Can Take It (1940)

(Alternative title of shorter film for domestic distribution: Britain Can Take It)
PRODUCTION COMPANY.........--++++ GPO Film Unit for Ministry of Information
DIRECT ORS va iu0.--nisccsasszveceosuecrtesesece Humphrey Jennings/Harry Watt
PHOTOGRAPHY sc2.-2cc-aseeecBevetoncoeees Jonah Jones, Chick Fowle
128 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

COMMENTARY os. <-...ccetvensesancnarenatone Quentin Reynolds

TEEN Gal Elles ee eence ser saeesacteecesrcceecena=ra 10 minutes

Heart of Britain (1941)

(Alternative title of slightly longer export version: This s England;
Eire title: Undaunted)
PROD UGIRION er seetercct-c.-
ceoeseeseeoss Ian Dalrymple for Ministry of Information
DIRECTOR gossictoteccs-cecnssncsresetsoasosons Humphrey Jennings
PHOTOGRAPH Yo..-cc-ccssncsscsssessoeenee Chick Fowle
{EAD MIN@) 5 Venocoarco renee se esos coaeenee erence csStewart McAllister
SOUNDS a sees es ae Sev cates aeeetadeanenors Ken Cameron
COMMEINTAR Yeisen saat sesssecerassrececescs Jack Holmes
DLEIN GD soacsoe ooceecssxkcxe-tcesneseenaecees 9 minutes

Words for Battle (1941)

PRODUCTION Si ccce caccctvneaeuceeous Ian Dalrymple for Crown Film Unit
PURE CLO R esecsscresaasusstcn.costeoteusestes Humphrey Jennings
FED)
TillO River cnoecsoxceasecsvtotascece
steers Stewart McAllister
SS© WIND eee rece nesc nee oceeceeceere
meee Ken Cameron
COMMENTARY SPOKEN BY............ Laurence Olivier
TING Te soeigaeseseecateckh
eceecen teheen dexeas8 minutes

Listen to Britain (1942)

OU CICON sicsas ccna! Ian Dalrymple for Crown Film Unit
DIRECTED AND EDITED .......<..:.... Humphrey Jennings/Stewart McAllister
[PRONMONG RUN ERGererene cccnaceeeerotosco. Chick Fowle
SOMIND ik tvicatthashceia ccna Ken Cameron
INSEL GON & Perenenoancen orecbacbaseceos: eee aeaasoS 20 minutes

Fires Were Started (1943)

(Alternative title: 7Was a Fireman)
PRODUCTION. 2 iscqtssepsa condones ees Tan Dalrymple for Crown Film Unit
DIRECTORS SCRIPT eon. Humphrey Jennings
PHOTOGRAPHY scsxcmtersatee esas C. Pennington-Richards
 FILMOGRAPHY VAR)

BEDI
© RUGaececaseeteets
fesse sessestcstecerce Stewart McAllister
STORY COLEABORATION =.....255 Maurice Richardson
MUSIC oaincct eee Er a William Alwyn
EEO (GEES aya v ce seen Ooeecacs se 80 minutes

The Silent Village (1943)

BRODUCTION: 2.22..2.234 23. Humphrey Jennings for Crown Film Unit
DIRECTOR ‘SCRIPT... 2 Humphrey Jennings
PHOTO GRAPE Vee ocoesrcecsescacseestocest Chick Fowle
SDT POR so oem Stewart McAllister
SOUS execs eee otwee re eer cns acceso Jock May
EPING Titre scececcrcescesteacenetsncesttcecsncers 36 minutes

The True Story of Lili Marlene (1944)

PRODUG TION Sree J. B. Holmes for Crown Film Unit
DIRECTOR/ SCRIPT s:sc00e2 Humphrey Jennings
PHOUVOGRAPEVY asevcesececssreceecerecerses Chick Fowle
ETERS sss socosucses see ce reeesee see eee Sid Stone
MUSIC 5 acreroa ta cecuec bese aicossencresesepeorare Denis Blood
DEIN G DH oeegssacc nen ee -ee cea seeeancee 30 minutes

The 80 Days (1944)

PRODUCTION Soot seteeecere tears Humphrey Jennings for Crown Film Unit
ERECTOR fe ccpercatarenrennarasivesennceve Humphrey Jennings
COMMENTARY 25-22-<-.02.casesteaterenaeee Ed Murrow
ASIN CANS lope errrrm rrcerrenceey
eceCeCcoce ree14 minutes

V71(1944)
(Made wholly for overseas use with same material as The 80 Days but re-edited and
with a new commentary)
PROD UG PION cee eer oversca-encecerceanst Humphrey Jennings for Crown Film Unit
COMMENTARY. ........-sscessseseensecereees Fletcher Markle
MBEINGo Elitesecesecevencreeenenenearc-caer--wsscs 10 minutes
130 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

A Diary for Timothy (1944—5)

(Released 1946)
PRODUGUTON esccescesercssceees eee Basil Wright for Crown Film Unit
DIRECFOR/ SCRIPT ...0 aoe Humphrey Jennings
PHOTOG
RIA PHY eeecseeecree
en oeerene Fred Gamage
BD
ETORS Sipe etree tenes her ccoieewesrcaeaet Alan Osbiston, Jenny Hutt
SOUND sigckteactectevicetssestoenesersestet Ken Cameron, Jock May
MUST Caterstersteect.ctoe-oeseructc
santeeeneereee Richard Addinsell
(GOIN
IMLS SITUNY eee neestcce
acon eccos E. M. Forster
SPOKEINEB Vitect vers oc canves esencscotaeceorese Michael Redgrave
MEU Gal HE ree cstcene tt vaseces tas crepeccenceet 38 minutes

A Defeated People (1945)

PRODUCTION wi veieeconcssccevs sceornecdstuer Basil Wright for Crown Film Unit (for
Directorate of Army Kinematography)
DIRECTORS SCRIPT sca. scree Humphrey Jennings
PHOTO GRADY Sra. ctse-ortcesce.seoneeces Army Film Unit
COMMENTARY SPOKEN BY............ William Hartnell
MUS @ivscs-2scuscqsessceacsesshaceccacestiecesters Guy Warrack
EIN
Ga iccsennecontece. sarethccsnsaceesecnsnctors 19 minutes

The Cumberland Story (1947)

PRO DUG TION 2 peeteith tateecmeteate Alexander Shaw for Crown Film Unit
(COI for Ministry of Fuel and Power)
DIRECTOR? SCRIPT veccccccusctcensitnn Humphrey Jennings
PHOTOGRAPHY oc ctientespacerenacees Chick Fowle
BURT OR Ste sersctotcdernscsi sc ees Jocelyn Jackson
DAN SIGS a isso cccenssa ce cee eee Arthur Benjamin
LENGHine aco ee toec eee 39 minutes
 FILMOGRAPHY 131

Dim Little Island (1949)

PROD UGaHIO Nee eee see vaca center Wessex Films for Central Office of Information
PRODUCER/DIRECTOR.........0:000++ Humphrey Jennings
PHOTROGRACHY 23.5
toe ee Martin Curtis
BDI
RO Rete eeeee eee Bill Megarry
MUSIG Se ae a Ralph Vaughan Williams
COMMEN
TAR Yiie-2 sees es Osbert Lancaster, John Ormston, James Fisher,
Ralph Vaughan Williams
TBI Goss ose sescncsvecccucanotrecdcccenencces 1] minutes

Family Portrait (1950)

PRODUCTIONE 22225. =: ccs5-bececstese
oesIan Dalrymple for Wessex Films
DIREGTOR/ SCRIP Tea Humphrey Jennings
PHOPOGRAPA Vii... c2cs:ssoseseasoseasonses Martin Curtis
EDIEOR ieee cea bea ce octane ee Stewart McAllister
SOUND) ete
oie asosonceohamepcements Ken Cameron
USEC eae
ae eee John Greenwood
COMMENTARY SPOKEN BY............ Michael Goodliffe
IEEEIN Gaba w es ese ccs eobeee ceases 25 minutes
Bibliography

Published Writings
‘The Duke’ and ‘The Charcoal Burner’. Two Plays from the Perse School, W. Heffer
and Sons Ltd, Cambridge, 1921.
‘Song’. Public School Verse Vol. TV 1923-24, edited by Martin Gilkes, Richard Hughes
and P. H. B. Lyon, W. Heinemann Ltd.
‘Design and the Theatre’. Experiment No. 1, November 1928, Cambridge.
‘Odd Thoughts at the Fitzwilliam’. Experiment No. 2, February 1929, Cambridge.
‘Notes on Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”’. Experiment No. 2, February 1929,
Cambridge.
‘Rock Painting and “La Jeurie Peinture”’ (with Gerald Noxon). Experiment No. 7,
Spring 1931, Cambridge.
‘A Reconsideration of Herrick’ (with J. M. Reeves). Experiment No. 7, Spring 1931,
Cambridge.
“The Theatre’. The Arts Today, edited by Geoffrey Grigson, Bodley Head, 1935.
“Three Reports’. Contemporary Poetry and Prose, edited by Roger Roughton, No. 1,
June 1936.
“Three Reports’. Contemporary Poetry and Prose, edited by Roger Roughton,
August/September 1936.
Review of Surrealism by Herbert Read. Contemporary Poetry and Prose, December
1936.
“The Boyhood of Byron’. Contemporary Poetry and Prose, December 1936
(republished in London Bulletin No. 12, April 1939).
‘Report on the Industrial Revolution’. Contemporary Poetry and Prose, Spring 1937.
May the Twelfth: Mass Observation Day Surveys 1937. Co-edited with Charles Madge.
Faber and Faber, September 1937.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 133

‘In Magritte’s Paintings’. London Gallery Bulletin No. 1, April 1938.

‘Prose Poem’ [‘As the Sun’]. London Bulletin No. 2, May 1938.
‘The Iron Horse’. London Bulletin No. 3, June 1938.
Editor, London Bulletin No. 4, July 1938.
“Who Does That Remind You Of?’. London Bulletin No. 6, October 1938.
“Two American Poems’. London Bulletin No. 11, March 1939.
“Notes on the Cleaned Pictures: Colorado Claro’. Our Time, December 1947.
Review of The English edited by Ernest Barker. Times Literary Supplement,
7 August 1948.
“Working Sketches of an Orchestra’. In Hubert Foss and Notel Goodwin, London
Symphony: Portrait of an Orchestra, The Naldrett Press, London 1954.
Poems. The Weekend Press, New York, 1951.

Broadcasts
‘Plagiarism in Poetry’. BBC National Programme, December 1937.
“The Disappearance of Ghosts’. BBC National Programme, February 1938.
‘The Modern Poet and the Public’. BBC National Programme, April 1938.
‘The Poet and the Public in the Past’. BBC National Programme, May 1938.
‘Understanding Modern Poetry’. BBC National Programme, May 1938.
‘The Poet Laureateship’. BBC National Programme, June 1938.
‘Poetry and National Life’. BBC National Programme, June 1938.
‘Science Review No. 10’ (on James Nasmyth’s steam hammer). BBC National
Programme, May 1939.
‘Pourquoi j’aime la France’. BBC French Service, February 1941.
‘The Silent Village’. BBC Home Service, May 1943.
Index

Page numbers in bold indicate detailed commentary (in Jennings’s own words up to
p. 77); page numbers in italic denote illustrations; f= filmography; n = endnote.

Addinsell, Richard 130f Blake, William xi, 77, 84, Cartier-Bresson, Henri
Allen, Chesney 46, 772 85, 102 109-10, 113, 121
Alwyn, William 129f Jerusalem 43, 104 Cavalcanti, Alberto ix, 11,
Anderson, Lindsay xii, xv, Blood, Denis 129f 77, 13, 35, 39, 88, 110,
xix Blythburgh Church 5 113, 124-7
Angels One Five (1945) 99 Borés, Francisco 109 Chambers, J. 126f
Apollinaire, Guillaume x “The Boyhood of Byron’ Churchill, Winston 44
Arnold, Matthew xi (poem) 111 Claude (Lorrain) 69
Arundell, Dennis 3, 4, 7 Boyle, Danny xv “Cleaned Pictures’ (1947
‘As the Sun’ (poem) 112 Brandt, Bill 110, 116 National Gallery
Attlee, Clement 112 Braque, Georges 12 exhibition) 67, 69—70
Attwater, Aubrey 3, 10 Breton, André x, 15, 27, Cobbett, William 67, 120
Auden, W. H. 13 114, 121 Cobden, Richard 115-16,
Breuer, Josef 22 116
Baillie, Isobel 75 Britten, Benjamin x Cohen, Sadie 48
Banting, John 125f Bronowski, Jacob 109-10 Coldstream, William 110
Bates, H. E., The Purple Browning, Robert, Home Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Plain 67 Thoughts from Abroad 43 83
Baudelaire, Charles, Bufiuel, Luis 110 Constable, John 107
Le Cygne 29 Burma, visited by H. J. xiv, Cooper, A.R. V. 85
Bawden, Eric x 67, 73-4, 74, 720, 121 Cooper, Edward (brother-
The Beachcomber (1938) Byron, George Gordon, in-law) 4
27, 123n Lord 19, 85, 707, 111 Cooper, Richard Synge
‘Bedford Square, 5 July (father-in-law) 4
1944 (poem) 59 Calder, Ritchie 127f Cossio, Felipe 109
Beethoven, Ludwig van Cambridge University Cox, John 124f
xiv, 42, 93, 97 viii—ix, 3 Cromwell, Oliver 52
Benjamin, Arthur 130f Camden, William, Cross, Eric 127f
Benjamin, Walter 111, Description of Britain 43 Crown Film Unit x—xi,
114 Cameron, Ken 126-8f, xvi, 38
La Béte Humaine (1939) 130-1f Cruikshank, R.J., Roaring
34 Canteen (painting, 1944) Century 66
The Birth of the Robot 112 Cubism 79, 108-9, 111,
(1936) x, 14, 74, 125f Carrick, Edward 127f 117,121
 INDEX 135

The Cumberland Story Elizabeth, Queen (consort Forster, E. M. 90-1, 92, 94,
(1946) 66, 66-7, 98, of George VI) 46, 89 130f
119, 130f Ellit, Jack 125f Foulds, John 124f
Curtis, Martin 131f Elton, Lady 99 Fowle, H. E. ‘Chick’ 40,
Cwmgiedd (Welsh village) Eluard, Paul x, 15, 114, 121 125-30f
xii_xiii, 36 emotion, depiction on film France, domestic politics
H. J.’s impressions of 91 see Popular Front
50-5 Empson, William viii, 13, Franco, Francisco 113
84, 106-7, 109-10 Freud, Sigmund 22, 27-8,
‘Daily Worker’ English character, H. J.’s 29, 109
(photograph) 114-15, commentary on 70-3 Fry, Roger 107
715 impact of war on see under “The Funeral of a
Dali, Salvador 109 World War II Nobleman’ x, 19
Dalrymple, Ian x—xi, xiv, English Harvest (1939)
xvi, 35, 39, 66, 128f, 131f 126-1 Gainsborough, Thomas
Darwin, Charles 22, 81, Ernst, Max 79 107
100, 109 Eskdale, George 76 Gamage, Fred 126f, 130f
Davenport, John 8 Euripides, The Bacchae 4 Gascoyne, David xv
David, C. H. 125f Evans, Dai Dan xiii George V 113
Davies, Hugh Sykes 8 Experiment (magazine) 8, George VI 89
Dawson, Nora 48 79, 109-10 Coronation x, 76, 113-14
Day Lewis, Cecil 13, 17 The Glorious Sixth of June
De Chirico, Giorgio 116 Family Portrait (1950) xiv, (1934) 11
A Defeated People (1945) 68, 77, 82, 85, 99-100, Goering, Emmy 37
64, 98, 130f 101, 120-1, 123n, 131f Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
Degas, Edgar 12, 69 Fanner, Alan 125f von xi, 36
Delacroix, Eugéne 69 Faraday, Michael 78-9, Goodliffe, Michael 131f
Design for Spring (1938) 100, 123 GPO Film Unit ix, x, xvi,
125f Fawkes, Guy 109 [ISN eon oie l02.
A Diary for Timothy (1945) Ferrier, Kathleen 75 110-11
xiii—xiv, 38, 60, 61-3, Fires Were Started (1943) Grant, Duncan 107
62-3, 0-1, 92-5, 92-8, xi-xii, xili, xix, 36, 45-9, The Grapes of Wrath
130f 4850, 96, 101, 128-9f (1940) 52
Dim Little Island (1948) critical/ popular responses Gray, Hugh 127f
68, 98, 99-100, 131f 55, 102 Gray, Terence ix
Duchamp, Marcel 111, The First Days (1939) 17, Gray, Thomas viii, 11,
114, 115 88, 126f 84-5, 107
Duff, Robin 126f Fisher, James 131f Greenwood, John 131f
Flanagan, Bud 46, 772 Grierson, John xi, 11, 68,
Eddison, Robert 8 Foot, Geoff 127f 87, 91, 112, 124f
Edward VIII 15, 113 Forbes, Manny 8 H. J.’s differences with ix,
The Eighty Days (1944) The Foreman Went to 43,99
101, 129f France (1942) 99 Griffiths, Fred 48
136 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Grigson, Geoffrey 14 Huskisson, William 19 Jennings, Humphrey cont.

Guggenheim, Peggy 115 Hutt, Allen 38 death xiv—xv, 68
Gurdjieff, G. I. vii Hutt, Jenny 130f education viii—ix, 3
family background vii
Handel, Georg Friedrich ‘I Saw Harlequin’ (poem) leadership qualities
91 57-8, 117 Vili-ix
The Messiah 75-6; illumination, imagery of political outlook xiv, 53,
‘Hallelujah Chorus’ 43, 111-12 67, 100, 114-15, 119-21
76, 39-90 ‘image,’ role in H. J.’s creative activities (other
The Water Music 42, 44 thinking 78-82, 84 than film-making)
Happold, F.C. 10 Industrial Revolution 112, acting 4, 11
Hardy, Thomas 24 ne art criticism 12-13,
Far From the Madding H. J.’s views on 85-6 19-20, 27-9, 67, 69-70,
Crowd xiv, 67 see also Pandaemonium 77, 79-80, 83-4, 108-9
Harrisson, Tom 16, 22-3, Ingres, Jean-Auguste 12 diversity of 105-6
113, 115 International Surrealist painting ix, 16, 20-7,
Hartnell, William 130f Exhibition (1936) x, 14, 28, 30, 68, 77, 78-82, 82,
Haydn, Josef 42 21, 114 83-4, 86, 106-9, 112,
Hayter, S. W. 13 112, 122
Heart of Britain (Jennings, Jackson, Jocelyn 130f poetry x, xiii, 26, 55,
1941) xiii, 35, 41, 47, 88, Jackson, Kevin xv 57-8, 59, 80-1, 112, 119
89-90, 101, 128f Jackson, Pat 88, 126f prose writings xiii, xv,
Heart of Britain (Vas, Jefferson, Thomas 80-1 15
1970) xv, 99 Jenkins, Timothy James stage designs ix, 3-4,
Heine, Heinrich xi, 36 xili—xiv, 61—3, 62, 95, 7-8, 108
Herbert, A. P., Az the Same 96-7 still photography xiv,
Time 3 Jennings, Charlotte 76, 20, 24, 74, 80, 107,
Hess, Myra xi, xiv, 46, 60, (daughter) xvii, 14 114-15, 775, 120, 122
93,97 Jennings, Cicely, née translation 15
Heydrich, Reinhard xii Cooper (wife) ix, 4, 4 as film-maker 87—100,
Heywood, Thomas, The 10 105-120
Fair Maid of Perth 3 H. J.’s letters to xiii, 7-8, archive xvi
Hitler, Adolf 36, 39 12-13, 31, 34, 40-5, career summary ix—xv
Holmes, J. B. (Jack) 128f 48-50, 52-9, 64-5, 74, commentaries,
129f 110 distracting/irrelevant
Holst, Gustav 125f Jennings, Frank (father) nature 89-90
Honegger, Arthur, King Wilh 2,2 critical/ popular neglect
David ix, 4,7-8 Jennings, Humphrey 17,
Honthorst, Gerard van 27 xx, 9, 21, 38, 48, 60 depiction of emotion 91
Hopkins, Dave/Mrs 54 biography/personal filmography 124-31f
horse racing 18 characteristics vii—xv; influences ix, 110-11
How Green Was My Valley childhood vii—viii, 2, leadership qualities
(1941) 52 5-7 viiiix
 INDEX 37

Jennings, Humphrey cont. Listen to Britain (1942) xi, McAllister, Stewart ‘Mac’
legacy xv 45-6, 46-7, 91, 112, 172, 36, 40, 48, 91, 101-4
poetic qualities xix, 87, 117, 178, 123n biography 102
99, 100 directorial credit 101, 128f colleagues’ comments 101
relations with colleagues Locomotives (1934) x, 11, film credits 101, 128-9f,
ix, xi, 99, 102-3 1246 If
role of music 117 locomotives, H. J.’s as producer 104
treatment of character commentary on 76—7 relationship with H. J. xi,
96, 97-8 London see St Paul’s 102-4
visual style 89-90, 91, Cathedral; World War II McDonald, Kevin xv
117 London Can Take It (1940) McNaughton, R. Q. 126f
Jennings, Marie-Louise 35, 39-40, 40, 88, 101, Megarry, Bill 131f
(daughter) xvii, 10, 106 104, 127-8f Men of the Lightship
Jennings, Mildred, née Hall London Symphony (1940) 102
(mother) vii, 2, 2 Orchestra 68, 75-6 Mesens, E. L. T. 15, 16, 27
Jennings, Thomas Lopokova, Lydia 107 Milton, John 85
(grandfather) 2 Lye, Veni x, 125 14588512576 Areopagitica 43
Jones, Jonah 40, 127f Miro, Joao 109
Jonson, Ben 72 MacDonald, David 102 Morris, William vii, 109,
Mackintosh, Charles 120-1
Keynes, John Maynard 8, Rennie viii Mozart, Wolfgang
107 Madge, Charles xix, Amadeus xi, 46
Kipling, Rudyard 44 15-16, 22-3, 24, 84, 113, Mrs Miniver (1942) 54
Kitaj, R. B. 116 114, 115 Murrow, Ed R. 129f
Kitchener, Lord 114 The Man Who Listened to music, role in H. J.’s
Knight, Castleton 98 Britain (2000) xv oeuvre 117
Knight, D. V. 126f Manet, Edouard 69
Markle, Fletcher 129f Nash, Paul 121
Lancaster, Osbert 68, 131f Marlowe, Christopher, National Gallery
Laughton, Charles 27, Dido Queen of Carthage see ‘Cleaned Pictures’
123n 8 Newton, Isaac 100
Lee, Jack 127f Marx, Karl 22, 109 Nicholson, Ben 31, 108
Lee, Laurie 32, 126f Marx Brothers 12 Nougé, Paul 114
Legg, Stuart 13, 14, 15, Mass Observation Noxon, Betty 10
124f movement viii, x, 15-16, Noxon, Gerald (G.F.) 8,
Leigh, Walter 124f 22-3, 25, 100, 105, 106, 10, 79
Lejeune, C. A. 55 113
Lenin (V. I. Ulyanov) 114 Masson, André 79, 109 Olivier, Laurence xi, 43,
Lidice (Czechoslovakia), Matisse, Henri 107 128f
massacre (June 1942) May, Jock 129f, 130f Orage, A. R. vii
xii—xiii, 36-7 May 72th (collage/ Ord, Boris 3
Lincoln, Abraham 27, 44, reportage book, 1937) ‘The Origin of Colour’
vl 76, 113-14 (poem) 114
138 HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Ormston, John 68, 131f Raine, Kathleen xii, xix, 8, Spare Time (1939) x, 17,
Osbiston, Alan 130f 90, 98 31-4, 32-3, 88, 100, 101,
Ouspensky, Peter D. vii Raphael 109 115-16, 776, 126f
Owen, Robert 120 Ravilious, Eric x Speaking from America
Pandaemonium 1660-1886: Read, Herbert 15, 17 (1938) 17, 88, 125-6f
The Coming of the Redgrave, Michael 3, 92, Spender, Humphrey 115,
Machine As Seen By 94, 130f 116
Contemporary Observers Reeves, James 12 Spice, Evelyn 111
xiii, xv, 56, 66, 78, 81-2, Rembrandt (1936) 27, 123n Spring Offensive (1940) 17,
119-20 Rembrandt van Rijn 27, 29 35, 88-9, 127f
‘Peacock Coal’ (poem) 112 Renoir, Jean 69-70 Spring on the Farm (1934)
Pennington-Richards, Rey, Loris 48 111
C.M. 48, 128f Reynolds, Quentin 40, 128f SS Ionian (Her Last Trip)
Penny Journey (1938) 17, Richards, I. A. viii, 10, 84, (1939) 17, 101, 127f
125f 106—7 St Paul’s Cathedral, images
Penrose, Roland x, xix, 27, Richardson, Maurice 129f of 81-2, 82
114 Rimbaud, Arthur 29 Steer, Philip Wilson viii
Perse School, Cambridge Rotha, Paul 43 Stein, Jenny xv
viii, 3 Roughton, Roger 15 Stephenson, Robert 42
Pett and Pott (1934) 11, Rouse, W. H. D. viii, 3 Stone, Sid 129f
1246 Roux, Saint-Pol 12, 13, 79, The Story of the Wheel
Philip IV of Spain 69 109 (1934) ix—x, 11, 125f
Phillip, Frank 92 Rubens, Peter Paul 69 Strasser, Alex 125f
Picasso, Pablo 107 Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) Stravinsky, Igor, The
‘The Plough’ (poem) 80-1 27, 123n Soldier’s Tale 107
Pollard, W. B. 125-6f Ruskin, John vii Street, A. G. 127f
popular culture, depictions Ruttman, Walter 113 Strong, Patience 17
of 116 Rylands, George 8 Stubbs, George 76
Popular Front (France) Surrealism viii, x, xv, 15,
113, 115 Sansom, William xii 19-20, 20-7, 79, 108-9,
Post Haste (1934) 11, 124f Sargeant, Malcolm 75, 110-11, 114, 121
Pourquoi jaime la France 89-90 Sutherland, Graham 121
(radio, 1941) 36 Scarlett, Yorke 126f
Poussin, Nicolas 69 Shakespeare, William xi, Target for Tonight (1941)
Powell, Dilys 97 72 102
Powell, Michael 117 Shaw, Alexander 130f Tarot cards, imagery of 84
Powell, Tom 51 Sheppard, J. T. 4 This Is England see Heart
Pressburger, Emeric 117 Sicily, Allied invasion of of Britain (1941)
Purcell, Henry (1943) 56 Tolstoy, Leo 52
Dido and Aeneas 4 The Silent Village (1943) Trevelyan, Julian ix, 98
The Fairy Queen 4 xii-xiii, 36-7, 38, 50-5, H. J.’s letters to 8, 12-13
King Arthur ix,3 51-3, 98, 101, 129f The True Story of Lili
Pyke, Geoffrey 22 Sinclair, Robert 126f Marlene (1944) 37, 37,
Smith, T. P. 48 98, 129f
 INDEX 139

Tull, Jethro 80-1 Walberswick (Suffolk) Words for Battle (1941) xi,
Turgenev, Ivan 52 Vil—viii, xv, 5, 6-7 35, 35-6, 42-4, 43-4, 91,
Turner, J. M. W. 123n Wallace, Graham 48 101, 104, 128f
Two Cities Films 38, 58 Warrack, Guy 130f World War II x—xii, 17,
Tylor, E. B. 22 Watt, Harry 35, 40, 88 >? 35-65, 88-98, 117-19
102, 126f, 127f Allied invasion of Sicily
V1 (1944) 129 Watt, James 100 56
Van Gogh, Vincent 69 Wavell, Lord 43 German responses to
Vas, Robert xv, 99 The Way to the Stars defeat 64-5
Vaughan Williams, Ralph (1945) 99 Londoners’ responses
x, 68, 131f Welfare of the Workers 39-40, 45-6, 48-50, 59
Velasquez, Diego 69 (1940) x, 35, 127f role of Russia 57
Vermeer, Jan 48 Wessex Films xiv, xvi, rural responses 41—2,
Vertoy, Dziga 113 66-7 50-5
Vézelay, Paule 31 women, H.].’s portrayals Wright, Basil 88, 99, 124f
Victoria, Queen 74 of xii—xiii, 89 130f
Vollard, Ambroise 69—70

List of Illustrations
While considerable effort has been made to correctly identify the copyright
holders, this has not been possible in all cases. We apologise for any apparent
negligence and any omissions or corrections brought to our attention will be
remedied in any future editions.

The Birth of the Robot, Shell-Mex; Spare Time, GPO Film Unit; Words for
Battle, Crown Film Unit; The True Story of Lili Marlene, Crown Film Unit;
London Can Take It, GPO Film Unit for the Ministry of Information; Heart of
Britain, Crown Film Unit; Listen to Britain, Crown Film Unit; Fires Were
Started, Crown Film Unit; The Silent Village, Crown Film Unit; 4 Diary for
Timothy, Crown Film Unit; The Cumberland Story, Crown Film Unit; Family
Portrait, Wessex Film Productions.

The paintings, drawings, photographs and collages by Humphrey Jennings

reproduced with kind permission of Marie-Louise and Charlotte Jennings.
 |
umphrey Jennings was one of Britain’s greatest documentary film-
makers, described by Lindsay Anderson in 1954 as ‘the only real poet the |
British cinema has yet produced: A member of the GPO Film Unit and
director of wartime canonical classics such as Listen to Britain (1942) and A Diary for
Timothy (1945), he was also an acclaimed writer, painter, photographer and poet.

This seminal collection of critical essays, first published in 1982 and here reissued with
a new introduction, traces Jennings’s fascinating career in all its aspects with the aid of
documents from the Jennings family archive. Situating Jennings’s work in the world of his
contemporaries, and illuminating the qualities by which his films are now recognised,
Humphrey Jennings: Film-Maker, Painter, Poet explores the many insights and cultural
contributions of this truly remarkable artist.

MARIE-LOUISE JENNINGS is a daughter of Humphrey Jennings,

eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland and a Fellow of Birkbeck Coll .
of London, UK.