1 - The war at home

Summary

In the 1939 Shirley Temple film of the classic children's story A Little Princess, young Sara Crewe rousts all the slumbering residents of Miss Minchin's Female Seminary from their beds with the cry of “Mafeking is relieved! Mafeking is relieved!” Sara patriotically drags her schoolmates and teachers into the wild London street celebrations marking the end of the Boer War siege that she and the rest of England had been following in the newspapers for months. This particular scene in the film seems a bit odd to those familiar with Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel (1905), however, because the novel never mentions the Boer War – Sara's father is posted in India, not South Africa. But in 1939, it was better to send Captain Crewe to Mafeking. With Britain at war and the United States weighing its options, fellow-feeling for the British was important. If a film was to inspire transatlantic loyalties, to remind American audiences of the kind of stuff those Brits were made of, then Mafeking Night was a perfect image to use. Mafeking, in the early part of the century, still meant wartime hope, British pluck, and home-front patriotism. Using Mafeking Night as its centerpiece, The Little Princess (the film's title) was a kind of Mrs. Miniver for children.

Mafeking Night must have been an irresistible choice for the makers of The Little Princess – it had military glory, class-mixing, and rowdiness in the gaslit streets of nostalgia-laden Victorian London.