Foreword
I originally intended to publish this article in an academic film journal so that it would more readily come to the attention of film scholars working in this area. However, perhaps because I was out of practice I just could not get the argument and evidence down to the maximum word limit of 9-10 thousand words so have decided to publish it here instead. I have kept the referencing system used by the journal, which is Harvard style in which short references are given in the text in brackets by author name, with fuller references in a list at the end of the article. This is somewhat different from the referencing usually used on this site, but not I think to difficult to pick up. I do hope film scholars will still find the piece here! – Chris.
1. Introduction: A Classic Story of Censorship and Some New Evidence
The censorship history of Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933) is well-known – a classic tale beginning in 1936 and culminating with the unexpected release of the film version (British National Films, directed by John Baxter) after an intervention by the Ministry of Information (the MoI) in 1941. However, despite much excellent work on this history, there is evidence which has been missed, especially on the British press coverage of this case between 1935 and 1940, together with recorded memories of some involved in production of the film, and some significant fragments of paraphrased and quoted text which allow at least a partial reconstruction of a missing negative BBFC (British Board of Film Censors) report on the re-proposed film in 1940 (the original was lost with other reports from that year when the then BBFC building at Carlisle House, Soho, was hit by bombs on the night of 10-11 May 1941 (Robertson, 1989: 165-6)). The first dozen words of this article’s title are indeed parts of these invaluable recovered fragments of text from that missing third censorship report. The fragments allow further insights into what was a remarkable change of view on the part of the BBFC about whether a film version of Love on the Dole could ever be screened, and also show that the MOI view did not altogether or easily predominate over the BBFC view. In fact, there were considerable disjunctions between these two important agencies which bore on the author and film-makers. The article will first give an account of the existing critical history of the censorship of the film of Love on the Dole (with events dated as precisely as they can be because the chronological sequence had an impact), and of how that history has been interpreted, while adding some further evidence which has been missed or remained under-examined. This will include new evidence from extensive press coverage between 1935 and 1941, including a sustained campaign of protest by Greenwood himself and allies, and some important memories of the production process in the studio between early November 1940 and completion in January 1941. Finally, it will analyse those lost fragments of text from the missing but key BBFC censorship report of February 1940. The also missing but necessarily more positive report of 1941 we can speculatively reconstruct only from its context and consequences. This body of new evidence – much though not all made accessible through newspaper digital archives – suggests some new conclusions to be drawn both about the actual censorship and production processes of the film of Love on the Dole and about the contexts and mechanisms of film censorship and of this particular intervention in sustaining morale. It also suggests that the final form of the released film was not simply a direct translation of a new MOI policy and aesthetic but also subject to last minute negotiations with the BBFC by its determined author and director, who could have much confidence that there was considerable press and a degree of MOI support for the line they were taking.
2. The Censorship of the first Love on the Dole Film Proposals: 15 March and 12 June 1936
Jeffrey Richards in The Age of the Dream Palace – Cinema and Society in Britain 1930 -1939 gave a detailed account of the first submission to the BBFC of a proposal for a film version of Love on the Dole by British Gaumont on 15 March 1936. This is part of his chapter on ‘Censorship in Operation: Domestic Policy’, and particularly evidences ‘how the Board dealt with “subjects calculated to ferment social unrest” ‘ including ‘industrial relations’ (119): ‘the most celebrated story of life in the Depression . . .did not reach the screen. It was rejected by both Colonel Hanna and Miss Shortt’ (119).Richards then quotes parts of the reports by each of the censors (strictly-speaking ‘script-examiners’) as follows.
[Colonel Hanna]: A very sordid story in very sordid surroundings. The language throughout is very coarse and full of swearwords, some of which are quite prohibitive. The scenes of [a] mob fighting the police are not shown in the play but only described. They might easily be prohibitive. Even if the book is well-reviewed and the stage play had a successful run, I think this subject as it stands would be very undesirable as a film.
[Miss Shortt]: I do not consider this play suitable for production as a film. There is too much of the tragic and sordid side of poverty and a certain amount of dialogue would have to be deleted and the final incident of Sally selling herself is prohibitive (119, quoting BBFC Report 1936/4.
Richards’ analysis of these censorship responses is that:
the ban on filming resulted from a mixture of moral (bad language, sexual immorality) and political (marchers v. police) considerations. But there is the general impression that it was unwholesome and dangerous to show the masses ‘the tragic side of poverty’, lest they be stirred up to do something about it, and that is a profoundly political judgement (119).
Indeed, the censors found objectionable issues in the narrative covering quite a range of their remits to protect the public from presumed harm. Miss Shortt’s report focuses more on the moral issues in the private sphere, and brings out her objection to the shocking sexual bargain which Sally Hardcastle is forced to make with the bookie Sam Grundy, while Colonel Hanna focuses more on the public sphere. Miss Shortt also seems to have a slightly literal sense of how play to film adaptation might work, with an assumption that the play dialogue would simply transfer to the film, and hence need ‘deletion’ from the play script. In fact, the screenplay of the eventual film, co-written by Greenwood himself and two other writers (Barbara K. Emary and Rollo Gamble), was a little closer to the play than the novel and did use some of its lines, but also differed in significant ways from either ‘in terms of the sequence of the plot, the portrayal of particular characters, and the handling of specific scenes’ (Hopkins, 2018: 164). Shortt and Hanna differ in the language of their prohibitions, with Miss Shortt judging the play definitely not ‘suitable for production as a film’ while Colonel Hanna thinks that ‘as it stands’ it would be ‘very undesirable as a film’, allowing the possibility that the work could be altered to become filmable.
The fact that British Gaumont submitted, as both censors make clear, the whole playscript is worth further comment, which it has not generally received. All the typed reports or ‘Scenario Notes’ of the two censors make clear in a heading what kind of material was submitted for their examination, specifying ‘Scenario’, ‘Typed story’, or ‘Script of stage play’. The heading for Love on the Dole was simply ‘Stage play’ (perhaps implying in contrast to the previous category that it was not just a typed theatre-script but a fully published text). Judging from the BBFC files the submission of a ‘scenario’ was the commonest kind of proposal, presumably because these could be relatively short and easily produced, even if a full screenplay had not yet been written (an economical sequence until BBFC approval had been gained). I speculate that British Gaumont, perhaps in consultation with Gow (since as we shall see, Greenwood denied he had knowledge of this proposal until February 1940), submitted the whole stage play text not simply out of reluctance to write a separate scenario, but because this might seem to them to offer a possible advantage. This has been insufficiently noted as a factor in the script examiners’ responses. We know from page numbers cited in Miss Shortt’s report that the BBFC was sent the Jonathan Cape edition of the play published in 1935 rather than the Samuel French Acting edition. Miss Shortt objected strongly to a passage in the play’s First Act on p.42 that she took – correctly – to refer to contraception, which she said without naming the dreadful topic ‘would be impossible according to our standards’ (BBFC Scenario Notes 1936/42a). It might though have seemed to British Gaumont that publication of the play by such an established publisher as a work of literature for both private reading and performance might act as an endorsement, together with the play’s undoubted success in the theatre, where the play had had little trouble in being approved for performance by the Lord Chamberlain’s office. It was clearly the case that there were different underlying principles for the separate bodies responsible for theatre and cinema censorship:
The Lord Chamberlain’s play-reader may not personally have liked the play’s politics, but was constrained by a sense that he can only censor plays which cross certain lines, and that it is legitimate for a play to cause ‘discontent with present conditions in the beholder’ . . . The film censors accepted that both novel and play were widely read/seen but nevertheless felt strongly that the story’s generally negative portrayal of British working-class life was too negative for a film audience to be allowed to exercise its own judgement on, even were it not for specific moral objections in addition (Hopkins, 2018: 144-148).
With one exception, all the film historians discussing these BBFC reports give a slightly misleading sense of them as concise. Actually, these judgements were informed in both cases by each of the script examiner’s own plot summaries of the events of the play, and these were longer than the judgements themselves. Only Sarah Street in her meticulous analysis of both reports quotes these plot summaries and sees that they played a significant interpretative part in the censorship decisions:
They are written in a factual style which nevertheless conveys something about the class and opinions of the writers . . . Reading their versions of the narrative it does indeed appear that their concern was to protect audiences . . . largely because the cinema audience was known to be largely working-class (2000: 28).
Moreover, though the judgements of both censors are reticent about sexual matters, both plot summaries make clear their full understanding of the range of controversial issues dealt with in Greenwood and Gow’s play-script and likely to be in a film-version too, unless both plot and details of speech and character were considerably altered.
After the BBFC’s reports Gaumont British simply dropped the project as unviable. However, the fact that Atlantic Productions resubmitted the Cape edition of the play on 12 June 1936, and with no attempt at modification, suggests that they in turn still thought the logic of prior publication and mass success might sway the censors. They were mistaken. Only one censor examined the proposal this time – Colonel Hanna, who was conscientious but consistent: ‘I have read this play a second time but cannot modify the first report in any way. I still consider it very undesirable’ (BBFC Report 1936/87). And that, it seemed, was that.
3. The MOI/BBFC Intervention: Between 15 February and 10 May 1940
The next element in the classic account of the censorship of a film of Love on the Dole apparently came after a complete pause of four years. Jeffries gave an account of the immediate consequences of the surprising decision in 1940 that a film of Love on the Dole was now permissible. His account is of the fact that this reversal happened and of a notable newspaper reaction to the film of Love on the Dole when released in June 1941:
What is perhaps even more remarkable than the thirties banning is that Love on the Dole was eventually filmed in 1940, complete with the sequence of Sally selling herself and the mob fighting the police, and argued powerfully that the conditions depicted therein should not be allowed to return. No further script-readers’ reports exist on the project but circumstances had changed and with them the standards and objectives of censorship.
Jeffries evidences this with a laudatory review from the Sunday Pictorial:
Time after time our censors have waxed apoplectic at the suggestion that . . . Love on the Dole was fit subject for a film . . . Now with unemployment a minor headache. the moralists have relaxed and the film has at last been made without a single change. The result is terrific . . . but it is not depressing. On the contrary it holds enormous promise for the future. If every man and woman in Britain could see this film, I don’t think we would ever go back to the dreadful pre-war years when two million men and women were allowed to rot in idleness (119-120).
As we shall see, the link between the changes in circumstances and ‘the standards and objectives’ of censorship was less automatic than Jeffries’ 1984 commentary suggested, and more complex than subsequent film historians have suggested. The Sunday Pictorial response is interesting in several ways. It shows a good understanding of the censorship history of Love on the Dole, suggesting or even assuming a public awareness of this. It knows quite well that the permissibility of a novel did not lead necessarily to the permissibility of a film version, and why. It sees the key social change as the reduced political impact of unemployment in a wartime economy which required a maximisation of employment. Finally, it reads the film exactly as it was read by the great majority of reviews as a contribution to the ‘People’s War’ understanding of the war as being fought not just to defeat Fascism but also for a better and more equal post-war British society once victory had been achieved by the shared commitment of all classes to the war effort.
What Jeffries’ account does not give is any detail about the mechanisms through which BBFC censorship was (apparently) supplanted by permission from the MOI. This detail was not explored until Street in 2000 discussed the intervention which, she argued, stemmed from a wartime ‘institutional shift in censorship activities’:
At this time the Ministry of Information was undertaking many of the censorship duties hitherto performed by the BBFC, and a process of redefinition of priorities was taking place. The dominant concern became ‘propaganda’ and Love on the Dole was appreciated as a different text, reflecting the shift in the censorship system from moral vigilance to the assertion of particular themes and values which converged with the official conception of ‘the national effort’ (31-32).
Caroline Levine similarly noted in her ‘Propaganda for Democracy: the Curious Case of Love on the Dole’ the specific events of the MOI intervention and its wider implications (Levine 2006). As well as recovering the details of how the MOI / BBFC approached Greenwood and Ronald Gow, Levine contextualised the emerging MOI approaches to debates about how a democracy could properly use propaganda without using the deceptions practised by the fascist states of Germany and Italy against which Britain was fighting a war of national, political and cultural survival. Levine argued that the BBFC censorship of the film of Love on the Dole was the ideal instance on which the MOI might put its new ideas about the paradoxical nature of democratic propaganda into practice.
First though she began, as Street did, with Ronald Gow’s making public of the MOI intervention in a letter to The Guardian on 3 April 1984, some ten years after Greenwood’s death. In 1984 the significance of this revelation by Gow caused little stir, but Street and Levine realised its importance two decades later:
In 1984, [Gow] wrote a letter to the Guardian, claiming that back in 1940, he and Greenwood were summoned to meet with J. Brooke Wilkinson, then Secretary of the British Board of Film Censors . . . “This film’s got to be made,” he reportedly told them. “We’ve got a tip from someone ‘higher up.’ I can say no more.” If Gow’s memories are accurate, then out of the blue, the highest echelons of government were insisting that a film of Love on the Dole be sped into production (Levine: 849).
In fact, Gow had already disclosed this confidential origin-story thirty-four years earlier on 4 February 1950 to the Wolverhampton Express and Star in connection with a new production of the play:
‘I think it is the only film which was made by order of the censor,’ he writes, ‘Around 1940 a copy of the book was sent to the British Board of Film Censors, who decided that they could hardly approve of some of the things in it. Greenwood and I were at variance on some points of production, and we let the idea of a film slide. Somehow it got into the U.S. A. and foreign press that Love on the Dole had been banned in Britain. Soon afterwards the late Brooke Wilkinson, then secretary to the Board of Censors, invited Greenwood and me to lunch. He said: “Now, you silly — (using a word well known in Lancashire), life’s too short for all this nonsense, Get this film made as quickly as you can, and let me tell you that it’s an order from higher up” ’. We never learned who gave the order, but obviously someone saw that it was a bad advertisement for democracy to ban it (p.5).
There are a few differences in the two accounts. In the earlier account Gow tells us something at which we could guess but which is not directly known from any other source: that the two authors again sent the BBFC a proposal for a film of Love on the Dole. Gow’s use of the phrase ‘a copy of the book’ might be taken to imply that this time instead of the play a copy of the novel was sent. However, that seems unlikely since the script-examiner/s could not reasonably be expected to read the whole novel, which anyway would surely not give a precise sense of the likely film treatment. It seems much more likely that Gow means that a copy of the Cape play edition was again sent, perhaps with some hope that the BBFC’s attitude might have changed since 1936, conceivably on the grounds that the war gave a new context for the work, including perhaps because unemployment had now receded into history. Given the extent of the 1936 objections this might seem optimistic. In the 1950 version Brooke was apparently inclined to blame the authors for taking the BBFC view too seriously. This, as Brooke Wilkinson and his two addressees would have all known, was itself ‘nonsense’: no film production company would start work on a film likely to raise any censorship difficulties without a workable report – the financial risks were too great. Brooke Wilkinson seems to be trying to let the BBFC off the hook of having prevented a film now declared to be desirable by the authorities (after all, the BBFC had a deeply-rooted conviction that it should support the status quo). I take it that Gow and Greenwood’s differences about ‘points of production’ concerned the extent to which they were prepared to modify the narrative to permit film production. Greenwood had often firmly stated to the press his refusal to alter anything he regarded as fundamental, even if this blocked a film version. After work had begun on the film production a number of newspapers recalled this history, and Greenwood’s apparent final control over the authentic contents of the project: ‘He was afraid of what the star system would do to his realistic slice of life . . . He sold at last on the understanding that he had more than an ‘author’s-eye view’ of the film in production (‘Film Notes’, by Molly Hobman, Bradford Observer, 30 May 1941, p. 2).
Though both Greenwood and Gow had been invited to the meeting with Brooke Wilkinson it is worth noting that Gow took no part in the writing of the screenplay, though his co-writing of the play version was credited. This might reflect continuing differences between the two writers about the malleability of the narrative for film. We do not know the date of the meeting between Brooke Wilkinson, Gow and Greenwood but it must have been between 15 February 1940, when the Daily Express reported a phone call with Greenwood on the previous day where he told the paper that the BBFC had again denied permission to make a film version (round-up of theatre and film news by Paul Holt: 11) and 10 May 1940 when the Daily Mirror reported concisely that ‘Love on the Dole . . . has at last been passed by the Film Censor for production’, before going immediately on to discuss the plan of John Corfield – the then nominated producer – to use unknown actors (Reginald Whitley, ‘Film Fame for Unknowns’: 8). Other papers made the same report, though it is notable that on 20 May 1940 the Manchester Evening News expanded a little with reference to BBFC conditions: ‘the Censor . . . has relented . . . on conditions that the street fight is left out and the ending changed’ (‘What We Think’ column under a separate paragraph heading, ‘Blinkers’, which clearly expressed disapproval of the BBFC conditions: 4). Kinematograph Weekly reported the reversal of the BBFC judgement on 16 May 1940, making explicit that this had long blocked the film of a notable work: ‘Efforts to acquire the film rights were defeated by the ban on the production by the BBFC. This ban has at last been lifted’ (33). By 13 June 1940 Kinematograph Weekly could report that David MacDonald (originally to have been the director) had visited Greenwood at his house in Polperro, Cornwall, where they ‘have been working on the script’ (35).
Both the accounts by Gow of the crucial conversation with Brooke Wilkinson include the phrases about a lead from above, though in one case it is referred to as a ‘tip’, in the other more forcefully as an ‘order’ and both also report interest in the US press as a key push-factor – though the 1950 account also adds pressure from the vaguer ‘foreign press’. Both Street and Levine note the mystification about the identity of the person ‘higher up’ who wanted action on the film. Gow’s letter indeed confirmed that in 1980 he had approached Kenneth Clarke, who was briefly in 1940 Director of the Films Division of the Ministry of Information. Gow asked him a direct question and Clarke confirmed that it was he who had given the instruction that the film of Love on the Dole should be made (Levine: 855). Sir Kenneth Clarke (1903-1983), later Baron Clarke, was an art historian and Director of the National Gallery between 1934 and 1946; among any other achievements he later became an eminent broadcaster with his BBC television series Civilisation (1966-1969). While director of the National Gallery during World War 2 he oversaw with great dedication and efficiency the evacuation of its paintings to safer places outside London, and was also appointed to the Ministry of Information as Director of the Film division (there is a probably unreliable story that this was a result of a misunderstanding of his reputation as an expert on pictures). See his wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Clark.
Like Street, Levine saw the BBFC as demonstrating a remarkable wartime shift of perspective, brought about by the creation of a new governmental institution, the MOI. Levine summarises four overlapping and convincing motivations behind the change of view:
First of all, the Ministry of Information was looking for ways to publicize the notion that Britain was a free society, but since propaganda itself was closely associated with the unfree states Britain was fighting against, the Ministry needed propaganda that did not look like propaganda. Second, it was crucial to the Ministry’s campaign to show that the nation was equal and fair, and a film that marked the distance between the poverty of the thirties and the full employment of wartime would be helpful for national cohesion. Third, the film’s bleakly realist style suggested that Britons were allowed access to difficult truths and so lived in an open society. Finally, the film’s plot suggested that it was urgent for the individual to sacrifice herself for the collective. (851)
However, I have found no US press coverage during 1940 (or 1936) of the British censorship of a film of Love on the Dole in and no sign of the species of headline Gow cited: ‘Britain Bans Workers’ Film’ (in the Library of Congress Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers database (https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/about-this-collection/). There are two articles referring to the censorship of the film of Love on the Dole, but both date to late 1945 when the film was finally released in the US. Both reports refer to a censorship history for the film for which I can find no evidence whatever. The Washington D.C. Evening Star gave a very positive review of the film but noted a censorship context for its belated US release:
The film . . . up until just recently has been the victim of a form of censorship, having been detained by the late Churchill government in England on the ground that such a realistic picture of the Depression years would take the minds of the British people off the war and its aims (‘Love on the Dole at the Little [Theatre] is a Realistic Film Drama’, by Harry MacArthur, October 25, 1945, p.B-8).
A Detroit Evening Times piece broadly shared this surely misunderstood history (by Walter Stevenson, 23 November, 1945, p.C-25). This is fascinating material which is too little known in Greenwood scholarship but adds no evidence to support Brooke Wilkinson or Gow’s origin story for US pressure to lift censorship in Britain in 1940.
More immediately relevant to 1940 is the earlier reputation of Greenwood (and Gow’s) work in the States which made it of continuing interest. There is evidence that British National Films originally intended that the film should be distributed in the US, and the UK-based distributors were after all called the Anglo-American Film Corporation. There is a single and critically unoticed British newspaper reference to a planned different sound-track for US distribution. The source was Greenwood himself in conversation with the London correspondent of the Bradford Observer who reported that:
Lest the North Country accent spoil its chance of an American market, Love on the Dole is being made with a double sound-track. For England the characters will talk in dialect. For export they will talk ‘standard’ with only a few ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ permitted and easy words like ‘gormless’ thrown in for local colour (13 November 1940: 4).
Most important though is that the completed film was submitted to the Production Code Administration on 26 November 1941 – another important occurrence of which Greenwood scholarship has taken almost no note, despite the full account by Anthony Slide (1998: 98-100). The film was submitted by Harry D. Buckley of United Artists and he received a response as negative as that expressed by the BBFC in 1936, advising that ‘United Artists withdraw its application for the code seal’ and noting: ‘ “insufficient compensating moral values for illicit sex”, the number of profane and vulgar expressions and the impossibility of recutting the film’ (Slide: 99). Unlike in the case of the BBFC, the PCA was looking at a finished film rather than a scenario, and the comment about a potential recut version must be based on the judgement that there was too much unacceptable matter for a trimmed version to be viable. Thus, nothing came of the original plan for a US release, nor of a subsequent attempt by Joseph I. Breen in October 1942.
Discussion of interest in the British censorship in ‘the foreign press’, might seem harder to explore given that this seems a large field. However, Love on the Dole as novel or play was known only in France and Sweden in the thirties. The Retropress national newspaper database at the Biblotheque National de France (BNF: https://www.retronews.fr/) archives numerous reviews of the French production of the play (titled Reves Sans Provisions, neatly I think translated back into English as Dreams without Means) during February 1937, but there is no reference there to censorship of a film version in Britain and no evidence of interest in this issue during 1940, when undoubtedly France had many other pressing issues to face. There is also a Swedish national newspaper database: https://tidningar.kb.se/. This brings up references to the play of Love on the Dole in London during 1935, as well as reference to a Swedish translation, titled De Stängda Portarna, (The Closed Gates) but has nothing about censorship of the film in the thirties or in 1940, though there is a reference to the completed British film in 1941 (the English-language film was classified by Swedish censors in November 1941 as suitable for viewing by those aged above fifteen – see https://www.svenskfilmdatabas.se/sv/item/?type=film&itemid=28157#censorship).
In the absence of evidence of press pressure from abroad, especially in the US, I speculate that actually there may have been anxieties in the MOI itself which they did not wish to make public about press debates about the film and censorship at home in Britain. This supports Levine’s suggestion that it was indeed ‘Greenwood’s letter in February [which] actually provoked the Ministry’s abrupt change of heart’ (855). The details of Greenwood’s letter will be discussed below in the next section, which will show that it was not a single letter alone which might have pressed on the MOI. Though there was relatively little press coverage of a possible film of Love on the Dole after initial enthusiasm during 1935 and 1936, the BBFC’s judgement did not quite put the lid on the idea, which was kept alive in the press during 1938 and revived with much more intensity in 1940 once the third BBFC negative censorship decision was made known and which stimulated substantial renewed press coverage.
4. British Press Coverage of the Prospect of a Film of Love on the Dole and of the BBFC Censorship: 15 February 1935 to 28 March 1941
The potential of cinema to influence public opinion and indeed behaviours and therefore the importance of a censorship system for film was readily appreciated in Britain, as Jeffrey Richards noted: ‘The full realisation by the Establishment of the importance of films in maintaining hegemony was translated into action through the system of censorship’ (1984: 89). There was thus much debate about film censorship and the role of the BBFC throughout the thirties in Parliament, among particular religious and moral interest groups, and in the press. Searching for the term ‘censorship’ across the decade in the film trade-paper Kinematograph Weekly shows that it had something to report about public interest in film censorship and the operation of the BBFC in practically every month of the thirties and on into the forties. Most often reports were about the principles and adequacy of film censorship and about those wishing to urge stricter censorship, preferably exercised by the State rather than a semi-trade body. There were also statements in which the BBFC defended its principles and their operation, and in which Government resisted arguments from some groups for a new State censorship system. More sporadic were protests from writers that BBFC standards made it near impossible to treat seriously important subjects – especially sexual relations in a broad sense. The majority of reports were at the level of general principles rather than about specific films, though as Richards notes there were particular controversies focused on individual films or groups of films. Such instances were reported keenly by Kinematograph Weekly. Thus, Richards traces the responses of various political pressure groups to the cutting of or even total bans on a number of Russian films, including Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Pudovkin’s Mother (95-99). Kinematograph Weekly followed this story carefully.
However, Kinematograph Weekly did not generally report negative BBFC judgements on individual British films It did though report arguments put forward at a Merseyside Film Institute event by Cyril Ray that secrecy in censorship was a particular issue for film:
The stage and the novel were far more free in their expression than the film . . . Censorship of the novel was in the form of open criticism; that of the film was semi-secret (‘Hidden Influences of Censorship’, 18 June 1936: 7).
It is characteristic that there is no reporting in Kinematograph Weekly itself of the first two damning BBFC reports on the proposal for a Love on the Dole film in 1936. Nor was there any reporting of this BBFC action in the wider press, which also reported, less frequently, general issues of film censorship. It may be that film production companies felt that any such public discussion would do their future relations with the BBFC no good, and equally may have felt that transactions with the BBFC were implicitly confidential. There was, however, considerable general press interest in 1935 and 1936 in the prospect of a film version of Love on the Dole, often hinging on who might play what was perceived as the star role – that of Sally Hardcastle. Thus in 1935 as soon as the play version had become a success there was chatter about the involvement of the Lancashire star, Gracie Fields. She endorsed publicly the authenticity of the play and her comments were frequently quoted in adverts for it. The drama critic Hannen Swaffer was also a keen supporter of the play (partly because it echoed his own disapproval of MacDonald’s National Party government) and quickly interviewed Gracie who had firm ideas of her own about a film version: ‘She wants the film people to let her act the heroine of Love on the Dole . . . the film executives won’t hear of it for Gracie. “It’s too political, they tell me”, she said’ (Manchester Guardian, 2 March 1935: 12).
Fields did not anticipate the censorship issues, but her reluctant acknowledgement that ‘film executives’ would see political dimensions of the work as in conflict with her star persona may suggest some of the difficulties likely to be faced by Love on the Dole as a film project in Britain. The press interest in a film of Love on the Dole starring Gracie Fields did not cease at that point. Three years later in February 1938, the US magazine Variety was still in its ‘Chatter’ column reporting a Love on the Dole possibility: ‘Negotiations still on for “Dole” as Gracie Fields pic, after author turned down $30,000’ (61). This does not explicitly refer to censorship but leaves to be wondered at Greenwood’s declining a very good offer, surely a result of a proposal which intended to alter aspects of his original.
However, what seems unusual about the case of Love on the Dole is that within a couple of years of the BBFC’s effective prohibition in 1936, a public discussion did emerge about its censorship and might reasonably be said to constitute a sustained campaign against the BBFC ruling, though it had never been made public. The campaign was at first conducted by people who had connections to the play and its authors, and who were public figures who could readily find platforms in the press. Wendy Hiller, whose role as Sally Hardcastle in the Garrick Theatre, London, production had brought her rapid star status, appeared as a keen champion of a film adaptation, as she vigorously stated in an interview in Picturegoer on 26 February 1938. The starting point of the piece was her role in the George Bernard Shaw film Pygmalion (directed by Gabriel Pascal, Gabriel Film Productions, 1938). It seems probable that she was aware that a film version of Love on the Dole has been prevented by the BBFC:
What I would really like to do after Pygmalion . . . is to appear in a film version of Love on the Dole. I have no patience with people who argue that because it deals with social conditions and problems, with slums and unemployment, it is too sordid and depressing for the cinema. After all, what about Street Scene and Dead End? Both were social. Both dealt with realities. Both were successful in England and America . . . I believe producers have greatly underestimated the intelligence of the film-going public. I am convinced that that public is ready to see and to appreciate the presentation of really serious and important social problems on the screen’ (‘Eliza Comes to Stay’ by Dennison Thornton, 13).
Hiller notably uses the word ‘sordid’ which appears in the BBFC reports about the film three times, as well as making the case that cinema audiences in Britain could be open to serious films. It is notable that her examples of permitted pictures are both US-produced films about social problems (Street Scene, directed by King Vidor, Samuel Goldwyn Productions, 1931; Dead End, directed by William Wyler, Samuel Goldwyn Productions, 1937). Perhaps the BBFC script examiners were inclined to be more tolerant of films set in the US and hence critical of American rather than British social conditions?
Hiller is likely to have known about the BBFC reports because she and Ronald Gow, the play’s co-writer, had married in 1936. Further interviews with her kept the possibility of a Love on the Dole film in the public eye during 1938, as she stressed how readily the work could be adapted to the film medium. Others in her circle echoed her sense that the public would be ready for such a film. In a press interview the star Leslie Howard did not refer to censorship, but expressed an eagerness to direct a film version of Greenwood and Gow’s work, asserting that the play was not on the margins but in the mainstream of acceptable British drama: ‘it was an English classic [and] he was struck by the similarity of the work to Shakespeare’ (West Middlesex Gazette, 23 April, 1938: 15). On 10 November 1938 Kinematograph Weekly reported the interest not of a successful producer, who had already produced some twenty-seven British pictures. This was Anthony Havelock-Allan, who firmly stated that next he wanted to film a work which he thought perfectly permissible on British screens: ‘People have told me that Love on the Dole is too sordid and depressing for the screen . . . But they are wrong. I believe that, properly treated, it could be made the film of the year’. (36). It is true that press interest waned during 1939 when there were no similar stories, but these earlier reports suggest a certain level of dissent from the BBFC view, enough to keep the strange non-appearance of a film version in the public eye. Certainly, there was enough press and public memory of the issue for it to be readily reopened in early 1940, and this time as a much more combative campaign, led by Greenwood himself and supported by other writers with ready access to press platforms.
This resurgence in press interest stemmed first from Greenwood quickly informing the press of his third BBFC rejection and then by the positively incendiary letter which he wrote to the Manchester Guardian, noted by Street and Levine. Here is the full content of Greenwood’s phone call of 15 February 1940 to the theatre critic Paul Holt at the Daily Express:
The play was seen by 3,000,000, including the King and Queen. But it will never be a film. Application to the British Board of Film Censors has drawn the tart reply that it would never be passed for exhibition as the theme is not acceptable under present war conditions. The theme is unemployment. I should have thought it would have been better for the authorities to get rid of unemployment first and worry about an unemployment play after. (11)
Greenwood seems to have brooded on this disappointment for just over a week before launching a strong counter-attack against the BBFC on 23 February when he wrote a letter to the press, followed up with another interview over the phone. In itself the making public of a specific BBFC decision was, as discussed above, unusual. Some of Greenwood’s arguments against the judgement were even more so. The two key arguments from his letter to the Manchester Guardian, headed ‘An Author’s Complaint’, relate to adulteration and to Nazi censorship Though the second of these is understandably more frequently referred to by film historians, the two are closely related by Greenwood and overly concise summary of his letter has hidden both the contained fury and the systematic nature of his criticism of both the BBFC and the co-operation of the British film industry with it:
Stories which have earned international reputation for themselves are bought by the studios, rewritten by ‘experts’ and are exhibited to the public, who, tempted by the familiar title, pay to find often that they have been defrauded of their expectations. Were the fraudulent adulteration to concern food the manufacturers would find themselves exposed to the risk of an action in law. We have been less vigilant in the matter of our films which should . . . concern food for the mind. Instead of having appointed official inspectors to see that we are not cheated in this supremely important matter we have permitted exactly the opposite in the form of an un-official body which has taken upon itself the power of a Dr Goebbels.
Greenwood’ unrestrained point is that these are serious defects in process in a censorship system.
His next three paragraphs develop this point in specific relation to Love on the Dole, first providing evidence for its reputation. Greenwood then explains its non-appearance as a film since 1933 through his well-known refusal to collaborate in film industry ‘adulteration’ and that three weeks ago a British film producer, (John Corfield) has at last agreed with his terms only to be blocked by the BBFC. Greenwood states that he did not previously know that the BBFC had judged a film proposal negatively in 1936, but was only alerted to it by someone when news of a third prohibition emerged (Gow?). This makes Greenwood query the force of the explanation he has now been given that the film cannot be made due to it being unsuitable in wartime. However, also running through these paragraphs is an argument about censorship and freedom. As well as his reference to Goebbels, Greenwood makes the case that wider democratic liberties are eroded by such censorship and ends with the radically anti-BBFC argument that there is only one censor an author should submit to in ‘the commercial cinema . . . namely the box-office’:
If this is denied me by an unofficial body then all the talk of freedom for which we are told we are fighting is so much claptrap . . . The freedom of expression which is now denied me is . . . one that concerns the larger community. We still have freedom enough to protest effectively – if there is a sufficient number of us energetic enough to do so (letter dated February 23, published February 26: 10).
The accusation that the BBFC was acting like Goebbels and restricting freedom at the very time when its citizens were being asked to fight against tyranny was surely painful hearing for that body and for the MOI – unless, as Levine argues, it gave the Ministry the perfect case for intervention to demonstrate that its control of information was precisely not totalitarian.
Moreover, Greenwood did not leave his protest against the BBFC at one letter, for he sent copies of the letter to regional newspapers too: the Western Morning News (26 February, 1940: 4) and the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer (27 February, 1940: 6). He also followed up with another phone-call to the Daily Herald on 27 February. Greenwood makes substantially the same points, but adds a new query about unemployment as an unsuitable wartime topic: ‘Why the ban? The theme of unemployment? Mr. Churchill tells us that soon there will be none; so it will then be a history of the bad old days’. To this the Daily Herald added its own point about BBFC inconsistency: ‘recently the censor has passed two British films in which industrial unemployment strongly figures – The Stars Look Down and Proud Valley‘ (‘Film Censor’s Warning’, with sub-heading ‘Author’s Why?’ signed P. L. M: 5). Soon others joined in to support Greenwood against the BBFC. Indeed, in the evening edition of the Manchester Guardian which published Greenwood’s first letter on 26 February an unnamed London correspondent added their criticism under the heading ‘Love on the Dole and the Censor’ (6). This too emphasised inconsistency in BBFC decision-making, repeating the objection that the war alone cannot account for the negative judgement if there was a pre-war prohibitive report on different grounds.
There were further responses. The Birmingham Mail discuss an extract from the letter in its ‘Seen on Screen’ column, with two sub-headings: ‘Mr Greenwood Wants to Know’ and ‘Is Freedom on the Dole?’. (signed L.B.P: 4). The columnist returned to the issue again on 7 March, stating that: ‘it is preposterous to suppose that liberty to read the book or see the play is not to be accompanied by liberty to see the film’ (10). On 6 March 1940 the leading drama critic James Agate devoted a full-page article in The Tatler to Love on the Dole and the BBFC under the title ‘That Censorship!’. Agate criticises the BBFC for tolerating the superficial while prohibiting the serious:
This . . . from a Board which has for years licensed films which glorify the relationship of gold diggers to sugar daddies . . . [and] has long laid it down that immorality is a fit subject for drama only if and when it is treated flippantly . . .The only alternative is that every playgoer who saw the play of Love on the Dole condoned an immoral spectacle. (8)
The same day The Bystander summarised Greenwood’s letter and added a point of its own. Did the BBFC fear: ‘it would rouse the indignation of the masses if they were told that some people in the country were so poor that they had to get a dole. Or do you think the masses . . . have already heard about the dole already?’ (‘The Passing Hour: Wartime Comments and Asides’, signed A.G. Macdonell, 6). All the press reports supported Greenwood – the Newcastle Journal was alone in saying that ‘film people’ often ‘do know their public better than do authors’, implying that it might have been wiser if the author had accepted amendments from the industry and the BBFC.
These were not the last of the press discussions weighing in on Greenwood’s side, but did mark the flush of immediate responses, though there was one further report which was in some ways climactic, even if it ended in apparent anti-climax. All Greenwood critics know that the play of Love on the Dole was brought to the attention of the House of Commons on 4 March 1935 when Sir Herbert Samuel, then leader of the Liberal party, during a debate on unemployment advised all MPs to go and see the play of Love on the Dole, which ‘paints in very poignant fashion the position of those 400,000 families who are in the state which I have just described’ (Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 5th Series, Vol 298, Col 1665). However, in 1940 Love on the Dole was again named in the Commons though this second occasion has remained completely unnoticed by both film and literary critics. Kinematograph Weekly reported on 14 March, some three weeks after Greenwood’s initial letter, that:
A sequel to the alleged ban by the BBFC on the production of a film of Love on the Dole occurred in the House of Commons on Thursday when the Home Secretary ignored the suggestion of a member that there should be a means of appealing against the decisions of the BBFC. Tom Williams asked the Home Secretary if he was aware that, when the Board of Film Censors, an unofficial body, had banned the production of a film there was no appeal to any official body against their decision; that this power might involve grave restriction on individual liberty and exclude the filming of many of our national characteristics, and if, in these circumstances. he would take steps to form a small body to whom writers and producers might appeal against the decision of the Board of Film Censors (12).
The Home Secretary evaded both key questions, denying that the BBFC’s decision was final, given that it was not binding, and simply not addressing the question of whether its decisions might restrict liberty and might call for parliamentary intervention: he said that the BBFC was set up ‘by the film ‘trade in its own interests’. Greenwood had predicted exactly this response in a unique variation only found in his 27 February 1940 letter to the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer:
In this banning of Love on the Dole the Government might play the part of Pilate and excuse themselves on the grounds of not wishing to interfere with the domestic arrangements of the British film industry. But as an individual, am I not entitled to claim the protective privileges which we as a nation have afforded smaller nations end for which principle now are at War? (6)
One can see that no government minister was likely to take on responsibilities for film censorship, when such issues were successfully absorbed by a body for which government could deny responsibility. I note Kinematograph Weekly‘s cautious use of the term ‘alleged ban’, as if this could not safely be asserted as a fact. Tom Williams was the Labour MP for the Don Valley in Sheffield from 1922 until 1959. He had been a colliery-worker for twenty-three years before being elected to parliament, and thus his intervention comes closest to Brooke Wilkinson and/or Gow’s (imagined?) headline about how bad it looked that a ‘worker’s film’ had been banned during a war partly for democracy. Even if any further action was evaded by the Home Secretary, Williams’ point had been made. Surely news of this discussion would have reached Brooke Wilkinson and, perhaps more importantly, Kenneth Clarke?
There was little further press discussion during April 1940, and then after press announcements in early May that the BBFC prohibition has been overturned, press interest turned with enthusiasm to the casting and production of the film. During pre- production and production between 16 May 1940 and 16 January 1941, Kinematograph Weekly reported conscientiously on all aspects of its progress, and noted two specific pieces of news about the BBFC which have remained unnoticed by critics: on 16 May it confirmed that the BBFC ban has been lifted, while on 5 September 1940 it reported that ‘the script of this subject has just been passed by the BBFC’ (p.31). This gives us some precise insights into the process by which the BBFC altered its decision, and how this interacted with the production. Clearly there was a phase of in principle permission, followed three months later by a concrete permission informed by actual examination of the script. The reporting implies that this time instead of being sent the Cape published playscript, the BBFC has been sent the film-script which Greenwood had been writing since June 1940. It also makes clear that the BBFC wished to see the whole treatment, and that it had formally ‘passed’ the script which means that the MOI intervention had not made the body turn over its role in censorship to that new wartime ministry. There is further evidence of this from another source.
There was one further press intervention, expressed with force in numerous regional newspapers. The timing was odd because while the piece continued to protest against the BBFC prohibition of a film of Love on the Dole, that ban had now been lifted and the filming of Greenwood’s narrative had even been completed. The piece was by Ethel Mannin, a long-time supporter of Greenwood, who had advised him to rewrite his early short stories as the novel Love on the Dole. The article was strikingly titled ‘Moral Gestapo – Not Here’. Though no national newspapers carried it, the column appeared in the Dalkeith Advertiser (9 January 1941: 3), the Ramsbotham Observer (10 January 1941: 8), the Hampshire Telegraph (17 January, 1941, p.1), the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette (20 January 1941: 4), the Lurgan Mail (1 February, 1941: 3), and finally the Motherwell Times (28 March 1941: 7). These papers presumably had a syndication arrangement, but nevertheless the column kept the general issue of film censorship in the air in places ranging from southern England and parts of the north to Scotland and Northern Ireland. It also kept the particular instance of Love on the Dole in people’s minds, and might prepare them to be interested when the film was finally released from its long censorship. Its argument developed in its own way points raised by Greenwood in his letter of protest almost a year before. In addition to its ‘Moral Gestapo’ headline the article had two further sub-headings: ‘Thin Edges of Thick Wedges’ and ‘Watching Our Freedom’. Mannin accepted that some forms of censorship were necessary during the war for security purposes:
Government censorship in regard to news and to overseas mail is to be expected; it is when censorship extends beyond Government emergency measures . . . that the public not merely has the right to protest, but may do some good by doing so . . . the British Board of Film Censors . . .[a] powerful, unofficial body determines what films the public shall see and what they shall not see. It has just decided that they shall not see the film of Love on the Dole despite the popular success of the novel and of its stage dramatization (Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette, 20 January 1941: 4).
Perhaps Mannin was out of date on the BBFC change of decision and progress on the film production – or perhaps she wanted to keep the ongoing risks of censorship at the forefront of public conversation even though that case had been resolved?
5. Screenwriter Barbara K. Emary Recalls the Actual Production Process of Love on the Dole at Rock Studio Elstree: 6 November 1940 to 16 January 1941.
The released film credited the ‘screen adaptation’ as ‘by Walter Greenwood in association with Barbara K. Emary and Rollo Gamble’.
Between 1938 and 1947 Barbary K. Emary (sometimes spelled ‘Emery’) worked as a screenwriter on films directed by John Baxter at British National Films. Though unnoticed by Greenwood or film scholars, Emary left a substantial oral history of her career. This includes her memory of the production of Love on the Dole and of the continuing role of the BBFC even as the film was shot from late 1940 to early 1941. Some of the material which follows was first published by this article’s author as part of a blog about Emary’s wider-ranging memories of the production of Love on the Dole (see Screenwriter Barbara K. Emary Looks Back on the Making of the 1941 Love on the Dole (1988)* ). Her memories were recorded during the British Entertainment History Project in an interview of over two and a half hours long (interviewer Bob Allen, 5 July 1988: Interview No.60 and transcript HP0060 – at The British Entertainment History Project | Barbara K Emary |). Barbara gave an account of her career with John Baxter, including her contribution to his film of Love on the Dole, and her experience of it in production. Emary was one of Baxter’s executors and provided information to the authors Geoff Brown and Tony Aldgate of The Common Touch – the Films of John Baxter (British Film Institute, NFT Dossier No.5, London, 1989). However, this specific information about Love on the Dole and her reflections on it did not make its way into the book.
Barbara began working with John Baxter as a typist whose job was to collate the script sections from different screenwriters and add any alterations swiftly as film production was in process. However, the role gradually began to expand and it is very clear from this that Emary certainly wrote specific original scenes for Love on the Dole. Emary recalled precisely something else not noted before: that issues with the BBFC continued during the actual filming of Love on the Dole especially in relation to the ending:
The censor did think the ending was not really as it should be . . . But Mr Baxter went to see the censor and talked him round, and I suppose Walter Greenwood did too. But it was a question of the way it was shot . . . [Baxter] made it a very moving end but not at all provocative or unpleasant (transcript, p.7).
Of course, this ending was also political in pointing out in a climactic way the utter desperation of the Hardcastle family and those like them, who were forced by near destitution to depart from the standards of ‘respectability’ and independence they had held so dear before the Depression. Though the BBFC might have preferred a ‘happy’ ending, this would have undermined the film’s reviewing of the thirties through a wartime lens. This was key to the ‘People’s War’ promise of Baxter and Greenwood’s film- narrative that post-war working people would never again be abandoned by the British state into such desperate conditions. Baxter and Greenwood must have persuaded the BBFC representatives that nuanced treatment of the ending could make it acceptable and effective and more meaningful in its new wartime context, and so avoided deleting a key element of the overall narrative architecture.
Emary’s memories of the day by day production, with visits to the BBFC offices may also illuminate a press comment which suggested that Greenwood was still under some pressure from the BBFC. On 1 June 1940 Greenwood wrote from Polperro to the Manchester Evening News to say there was some degree of flexibility on his part:
As a result of discussions between myself and the British Board of Film Censors certain passages in Love on the Dole may call for some slight modification in the film version. There is no reason to suppose that this cannot be accomplished without making the film, in the words you used, something quite different from the book (2).
This is a response to the paragraph in the same paper headed ‘Blinkers’, published on 20 May, denying that the film under censorship constraints would change ‘to something quite different’.
6. What the Censors Said: Fragments of a Script Examiners’ Report, 27 February 1940
I have saved till last the few fragments of the lost BBFC report to which Greenwood reacted so aggrievedly in late February 1940. These are a probably close paraphrase and I think a direct quotation from the report in a letter to the producer, still John Corfield, which he passed on to Greenwood’s agent who quoted it to the author himself. Thus, the Daily Express report on 15 February 1940 of a phone call from Greenwood gives this paraphrase: ‘application to the British Board of Film Censors has drawn the tart reply that it would never be passed for exhibition as the theme is not acceptable under present war conditions’ (p.11). The probably verbatim quotation is in Greenwood’s letter a fortnight later to the Daily Herald:
The author has been informed by the British Board of Film Censors that the film would be ‘most undesirable’ just now, and strongly urged not to proceed with it, at least for the duration of the war. Any completed production ‘would not be acceptable’. . . The film company anxious to make it tell me they have also had a letter from the Board, stating that such a film would certainly give offence, and might come within the ambit of security censorship’ (27 February 1940, p.5).
It is impossible to tell without more of the report if there was further reference to ‘the moral’ objections raised in the 1936 report but the phrase ‘would certainly give offence’ suggests that concern continued – as is also suggested in the Emary’s evidence about the continuing conversations with the BBFC. Nevertheless, these fragments also suggest a new wartime focus for the unacceptable in the BBFC. The phrase ‘ambit of security censorship’ does not seem part of a characteristic BBFC vocabulary. This is a phrase much more likely to be in regular use within the newly-founded MOI.
In his seminal study of the MoI, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information (Routledge, 1979), Ian McLaine suggests, though officials did not say this explicitly, that ‘the example of Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda clearly played a part in [the] early decision to create a Ministry of Information’ while also motivating it to be a very different agency (MacLaine: 12). Greenwood’s own public reference to Goebbels may have spoken loudly to the MoI. McLaine makes clear that ‘security censorship’ was an MOI term with a very specific range of meanings, and that a precise understanding of the term was a central issue for the MOI’s policies and self-image. When first planned in principle in 1935 ‘security censorship’ was one of a range of its responsibilities:
the Ministry was allotted five broad functions whose necessity in time of war few questioned: the release of official news; security censorship of the press, films and the BBC; the maintenance of morale; the conduct of publicity campaigns for other departments; and the dissemination of propaganda to enemy, neutral, allied and empire countries (3).
Security censorship was intended strictly to refer to the prevention of unintentional dissemination of information of potential military value to the enemy. McLaine argues that as the Ministry came into being it developed core beliefs about using security censorship with a light touch wherever possible and concentrating instead on a positive policy of sustaining morale, democratic values, and the will to fight: ‘the Ministry simultaneously attached great importance to releasing simple, unadorned news and tried to persuade other departments to limit their requests for censorship strictly to matters of security’ (138). McLaine cites numerous leading figures within the MOI asserting strict boundaries to what was covered by ‘security censorship’ under Defence Regulation 3, which simply ‘forbade the publication of matter likely to be of military value to the enemy’ (244). While the film censor T.P. O’Connor’s infraction number 19 from his 1916 BBFC list does cover information likely to be of use to the enemy, he does not use the precise term ‘security censorship’ (see list BBFC website: https://www.bbfc.co.uk/education-resources/student-guide/bbfc-history/1912-1949). This apparent BBFC use of the term does not accord with its MOI usage, since while a film of Love on the Dole might be argued to be damaging to morale, it could not be said in any dimension to bear on information of military value. Street suggests that during 1941 the MOI ‘was undertaking many of the censorship duties hitherto performed by the BBFC’ (31), but the new evidence about Love on the Dole strongly suggests that this does not really describe the case. The two bodies continued with different priorities and these could conflict. The BBFC here may be misapplying an MOI criterion to add extra wartime weight to its continuing prohibition on the film – something which Greenwood himself noted with anger in his letters of protest as a new censorship tactic. It is impossible to tell which script-examiner composed the fragments, but both Colonel Hanna and Miss Shortt were still in post and would no doubt wish to contribute to the war effort and might have been tempted to slightly expand their censorship activities into preventing damage to morale through permitting damaging images of Britain, past or present. There must also have been a second BBFC report before May 1940 which issued a revised positive view of the Love on the Dole film project. What could it have said? Might the key theme have been the changed wartime conditions and the value of seeing the thirties as an aspect of Britain’s history which must be come to terms with to reward all classes now offering equality of sacrifice with glimpses of a post-war Britain worthy of them?
It is noticeable that the MOI only seems indirectly to have intervened in the censorship process via the BBFC Secretary Brooke Wilkinson, and while he told the two authors that the film must be made he clearly did not tell them it could be produced without any restriction, and as we have seen BBFC officials themselves took a more obvious role in the production process than the MOI. This was in line with MOI policy which generally avoided looking like the agency directly behind film and literary projects, precisely because that might look as if it disseminated state propaganda: ‘much of its work . . . was conducted through outside organisations’ (Holman. 2008: 91), though there certainly were works they ‘signed’:
The script examiner who wrote this report about Love on the Dole presumably took the view that ‘security censorship’ covered anything which might be critical of the establishment, regarding that in itself as damaging to morale. That however was not the view of the MoI – though it handled many challenges to its distinction: ‘In a process similar to that which made the service departments regard almost all information as of military value, the War Cabinet often viewed criticism of its policies as destructive of morale and therefore of the nation’s war effort’ (McLaine: 89). The film – like the novel and the play – does implicitly and explicitly criticise the interwar National Government of which strictly speaking the wartime coalition was an extension, there having been no new general election since 1935. However, public perception may well have seen the coalition government headed by Churchill as constituting a new beginning. Certainly, the closing caption signed by the Labour First Lord of the Admiralty, A.V. Alexander, gave official backing to the strong ‘people’s war’ element which Baxter and Greenwood introduced into the film version. This directly suggested that the present Government, like the majority of the British people, regarded the interwar handling of the Depression as an error of political judgement and a failure of democratic sympathy, to be put right in a new Britain when victory was achieved (it has been suggested that this caption was added to a 1945 or 1948 re-release, but this was not the case as explicit references to it in 1941 reviews make clear). Churchill, despite surely being desperately busy in June 1941 managing a multi-front war on sea, land and air, attended a private pre-release viewing of the film and gave it his blessing: ‘Lord Beaverbrook reported that “the Prime Minister and Mrs. Churchill . . . praised it highly” ‘ in a letter to G. W. Parish (2 June 1941)’ (in the Lance Comfort Collection, British Film Institute Library, London – cited in Levine’s footnote 19: 850). I have been unable to gain much sense of how many new films the prime minister made time to see during the war, but do not feel it can have been many, unless it is that his biographers have not thought it an issue of prime concern. Surely, this was a film to which special attention was being paid at high levels, which is not to say that its form and tone were a direct product of that interest: on the contrary the film we have is related in complex ways to several different and competing ways of understanding wartime morale and censorship.
7. Conclusion: Agencies, Disjunctions and Conjunctions, 1936 to 1941
As Jeffreys, Street and Levine have shown in their work, the BBFC in 1936 (and again in 1940) and the MoI in 1940 took very different views of how Love on the Dole as a film might relate to the status quo and to the representation of Britain. For the BBFC in 1936 a film version was likely to enter into territory which their established ‘standards’ ruled as unsuitable and potentially damaging for a mass British cinema audience, particularly by including vulgar idioms, unapproved sexual behaviour, birth control, its representation of the police, and material about conflict in industrial and class relations. In 1940 they added objections to such a film’s impact on morale. For the MoI a film version appeared likely to be the exact instance they needed to show very publicly that they were not an agency of state propaganda like that of Goebbels in Nazi Germany, but on the contrary were dedicated to supporting democratic values and potential post-war social and political change. This intervention was given even more impact by the considerable press coverage of the particular case of Greenwood’s film, even if the BBFC’s representative preferred to attribute pressure to an overseas press. Greenwood’s own reference to Goebbels was an absolute gift to the MoI. However, the detailed evidence explored in this article shows that there was no smooth transition between these two agencies, their underpinning rationales and aesthetics, but a much more fractured and asymmetric process in which author, newspaper critics and film-makers played out the disjunctions. Despite Brooke Wilkinson’s ‘higher up’ phrase, the MoI was not automatically the superior agency and while it pursued its functions, the BBFC continued to carry out its own processes without undue deference. The actual film produced might have turned out very differently if negotiations with the BBFC during production had taken even slightly different turns – they were a set of nuanced conversations in which the MoI took no direct part. There is a critically unnoticed speech by John Corfield from 1940 which nevertheless does suggest a clear knowledge of MoI approaches to morale within British National Films, including an explicit reference to Love on the Dole as a prime instance of continuing freedoms in wartime Britain – though we do not know how Corfield acquired this understanding. The speech is reported in a US paper, the Springfield Weekly Republican, as having been given in London on July 20, 1940, but I have not yet located its occasion. Corfield opens by explaining that he will adopt a new approach in This England (directed by David MacDonald, released July 1941). So far pictures have been made ‘showing what we are fighting against. I am going to make a film which will show what we are fighting for’. After an account of This England Corfield explains his planned approach to Greenwood’s film:
People have said to me that I should not make such a picture just now. I do not agree. Love on the Dole shows a black page in British history. I admit that, and we shall not mitigate it in the film, but we shall emphasise that such things must not happen again in the new England that I think will arise after the war. It is, I think, a hope for the future, in these totalitarian days, that we are free to make a film of this sort. It could not happen in many countries today (July 25: 11).
The whole article also opens with a statement by the Springfield Weekly Republican reporter saying that for both film plans ‘the British authorities have given him their blessing’. Of course, we do not know which authorities are referred to – the MoI or the BBFC or both? Corfield took little part in the production of the film – though he had negotiated the vital contract with Greenwood – but his stated idea clearly persisted as a production value and made it into the final release, and into the important final caption signed by A.V. Alexander which exactly encapsulates the film itself as an act of free expression and states a commitment to a more equal post-war Britain. Baxter and Greenwood certainly shared these ideas and expressed them through the film, and indeed Greenwood somewhat rewrote the history of his own novel and the play version as having always been motivated by a ‘people’s war’ narrative in a ‘manifesto’ he published in The Sunday Mirror (as well as the Sunday Pictorial) on 17 August 1941 (7):
I wrote a book, you may remember. It was called Love on the Dole. Then it became a play. Now it’s become a film. In every guise, Love on the Dole was intended to point to the kind of Britain we don’t want after this war. A Britain of unemployment, misery, repression and injustice. This book was intended to be the harbinger of a New Britain. Let us fight and beat Hitler by all means. But while we’re doing it, let us bear in mind these other enemies. For they are just as big a threat to democracy and decent living and to happiness (p.7).
This makes it sound as if the final shape of what Greenwood regarded as an ‘unadulterated’ film of his novel was teleological, that is bound to be as it finally turned out. However, that seems to have been far from the case: it was a close-run outcome that the film fulfilled MoI politics and aesthetics despite the BBFC’s continuing application of its own rules. Despite the fragments of the 1940 BBFC report’s references to wartime conditions, Emary’s evidence suggests the BBFC was still much concerned with its own pre-war codes. Kenneth Clark’s sense that this film could be an ideal fulfilment in practice of the MoI as not being a propaganda agency was thoroughly vindicated by the positive press and audience reception of Love on the Dole, as well as by its own narrative and aesthetics and their validation of the people’s war understanding of why Britain was fighting. In addition, the role of the British, rather than overseas, press in bringing pressure to bear on the authorities (perhaps both the BBFC and the MoI) showed in public that there was still a free press and freedom of expression in wartime Britain, though it faced some challenges.
References
Aldgate, T and Brown, G. (1989), The Common Touch – the Films of John Baxter, British Film Institute, London.
Greenwood, W. (1937), The Cleft Stick, Selwyn & Blount, London.
Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 5th Series, Vol 298, Col 1665.
Holman, V. (2008), Print for Victory: Book Publishing in England 1939-1945, The British Library, London.
Hopkins, C. (2018), Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole: Novel, Play, Film, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool.
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