Marion Hewitt interview for Messages Home

22 June 2016

 

The director of the North West Film Archive talks about Channel 4’s moving look at a unique series of films made in World War II

 

Can you explain your job title and what your job ordinarily entails?

I’m the Director of the North West Film Archive, which is part of Manchester Metropolitan University. Our core activities are locating and preserving and making accessibly films made in or about the North West. There’s a team of nine of us here – we have technical expertise, and we have people delivering access services, and people talking to potential donors and film collections. It’s a cycle of bringing new material in and processing it and digitising it to make it accessible, and then working with other individuals and organisations, museums and galleries and artists and TV companies, for them to use it in their work. We also take films out and about around the region, usually on the theme of place: Your town on film, coming to a cinema near you. So we find it, preserve it, and make it available.

 

This story begins with the discovery of some old reels of film discovered under Manchester Town Hall. What was on the film? And how were they discovered after so long?

I think the discovery was made in one of the moments when old buildings get refurbished, and somebody goes into basement rooms that have been undisturbed for a while. I think those films, which all relate to Manchester, and the towns around, must have accumulated there at the end of the 1940s after they had first been screened in the cinemas. They are filmed messages – all the reels contain is a series of men coming forward to deliver their message to the camera, and then they were shown at the cinema back home, to an invited audience of relatives. And then they were simply stashed. Why they happened to end up in the town hall we have no idea. We don’t know when they were put there or who decided to save them. Part of the story of the Calling Blighty films is that there were 391 issues filmed, and only about 50, that we know of, have survived. I think the general attitude was “We’ve shown that, so we don’t need to keep it.”

 

So of the 50 that have survived, how many were in this find?

Half of those. We found about 25 reels. We had a couple already, and we’ve found another one since, but we found 23 issues in one batch in the town hall.

 

Who were the soldiers on the film? Why were they known as the Forgotten Army?

The Forgotten Army was the 14th Army, sent to the Far East. Because they were so far away, they were poorly equipped, they didn’t get any home leave, they didn’t get the same opportunities and training as troops in the European theatre of war. They became known as the Forgotten Army. There’s a nice quote from Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Allied Commander in South East Asia, who said “I understand you believe you’re the forgotten army. That’s not true… The truth is, nobody’s ever bloody well heard of you.” This was apparently greeted by loud cheers.

 

Clearly this was a large and expensive project back in WWII. What was its purpose?

It was a morale-building exercise. Because of their situation out there, there was a lot of grumbling. Letters were so important to the families and the men. I think it was a newsreel cameraman who made a few messages home for the mainstream newsreels, but because they were shown all over the country, nobody knew who the two blokes were in the newsreel clips. So the newsreel company stopped doing them, and said to the army cinematograph unit “Why don’t you do these?” So that’s how it came about. It was picked up by the army, so there was something much more substantial to send home to the families. The men who appeared in them would have been gathered together when they were on leave in camps, where they would play ping pong and swim and do a bit of tourist travelling around the sites. So a camera crew would turn up at the rest camp and say “Right, who’s from Wigan?” and gather a group of men together to film something that would then be sent back for a special screening in Wigan.

 

Did the same thing happen to troops fighting in Europe?

As far as we know it was only in Burma. An Imperial War Museum researcher who’s now retired wrote the definitive article on the Calling Blighty films, and as far as we know there was no equivalent elsewhere.

 

How did the film find its way to the North West Film Archive?

The workmen who were stripping asbestos from the town hall basement, and fortunately one of them had heard of the North West Film Archive, which had been going less than ten years at that point. So we got a phone call, and were given a stack of films. This was in 1984. The films were then looked at, we realised what they were, and the original 35m reels went to the Imperial War Museum for copying. So they hold them as well. But the key thing abiout this collection, as opposed to other Calling Blighty films that turned up, was that inside the cans were typed lists of the mens’ name, rank, serial number and regiment, and the names and addresses of all the families, their mums and dads, their wives and children who were to be invited to the screening. That was gold dust. From that we constructed a database to search for names, and we just nibbled away at that over the years.

 

So the films were found 32 years ago. Why make this film now?

Being part of the University, we are used quite a lot by staff. There are a lot of creative people, and one of the Arts School professors is a film-maker, Steve Hawley. He had been working on one of his own projects, and went to a film archive in Southampton, and he came back and told me about this amazing film he’d seen with soldiers sending messages home to their families. So I told him we had about 25 of them, and at that moment we both thought “Let’s do something with this.” Often that’s how things work here – I know there’s a good story in there, but I never find the right moment to do something about it. But with someone else involved, it makes all the difference. That’s why collaborations are so important. That’s the way the ideas develop – in partnership with other people. So we decided to find as many of the families as we could and have a screening at the cinema. And while we were doing publicity for that, we were on the Today Programme on Radio 4, and Emma Morgan, from Oxford Scientific Films, heard that item, and wanted to make a film.

 

When the idea for a screening?

These films would have originally been shown to families in cinemas, so we wanted to try and track down veterans or their families to recreate the screeninmgs in the 1940s. It was quite simply that.

 

How difficult was it to track people down? How long did it take?

We launched it in about May 2015, and we found about 50 families within a month or two. Then Oxford Scientific Films very quickly got a commission, so they set to work with their researchers, and they had a little bit of development money, so two or three people were working for them, going into detailed service records, looking up the regiments, finding what they hoped were interesting stories about the regiments. And they were the ones who found the five people who were the most varied and interesting, and willing to participate.

 

Did you encounter anyone who didn’t want to participate?

No, everyone wanted to be in it! We had 230 people at the fist screening, it as a full house. I had to fight people off, a lot more people wanted to come than there were seats. There was such pride from the families. And they frequently weren’t aware of what the veterans had done.

 

In one case, there was a woman there who had never even met her father.

That’s right. Ann Alsop was about three when her father was killed in action. She’d never met him, her mother had been pregnant when he went off. When he didn’t come back, her mother remarried and changed her name and moved on. It was only after her mother had died, and her mother’s brother gave her some photographs and correspondence, that she learned more about her origins. But she never followed it up, and was amazed when the team tracked her down. She’d seen photos of her father, buit obviously nothing moving, and never heard his voice.

 

It had quite an effect on her, didn’t it?

Yes. She ended up going to see her father’s grave in Burma. I think she found that very moving. When she saw the film for the first time, she was very quiet, but she didn’t seem very upset. I think it took a while to realise what it actually meant to her. She became more and more moved as the story developed.

 

How many screenings did you do, and what were they like?

Well, we did a main one, and went along and filmed it. I’ve only done one other one, last week, with a much smaller crowd – about 50 – in a completely different place. The experience of being in a room full of other people who appreciate what they’re seeing, and have a strong emotional investment in the story, is amazing. I get a lump in my throat when I watch the se films anyway, and it’s much worse when you’re there with all the families.

 

You didn’t just track down the families – you managed to find someone who appeared in one of the films, didn’t you?

Yeah, we found two veterans, and one of them appears in the film. He remembers being filmed and how it all happened. He was delighted to see himself. The other chap that we found was a seaman on an Aircraft Carrier, and his vessel had just docked briefly, so he just happened to be there when they were filming. He didn’t actually serve in Burma. Those are the only two living vets that we found.

 

What single moment in this whole process has meant the most to you?

I think one of the most moving stories for me didn’t make it into the programme – a gentleman discovered his father in our database. He wanted to come to the screening we put on, but he wasn’t very well, so he had a hospital appointment. And it turned out that he had a dreadful cancer diagnosis and didn’t make it. But his sister was in touch with me and was terribly grateful that he’d been able to see this clip before he died, because he had had quite a difficult relationship with his father, and it gave him some closure, to see him as a young man, speaking in a confident way. That stays with me, that it made such an impact on that man’s life as he was facing his end. And the other thing is getting it on the telly. We embarked on this just to show it to a few hundred local people – now we’re going to get a much wider audience. That makes a huge difference.

 

Do you think there are other bits of film like this, waiting to be discovered somewhere?

I think there’s always film iout there waiting to be discovered. We find new material all the time. Not always as exciting as this, but it’s all a valuable record of life in the region. Just when you think there can’t be anything left, and the museums and galleries have turned out every last cupboard, somebody finds a door that’s not been opened for a while.

 

Messages Home: Lost Films of the British Army is on Sunday 26th June at 8pm on Channel 4

 

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