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Propaganda for Democracy: The Curious Case of Love on the Dole

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Caroline Levine
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , October 2006 , pp. 846 - 874
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2006

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References

1 Greenwood's novel was an immediate success when it first appeared in England in 1933. Reissued ten times in just three years, it was also translated into a number of languages, including Hebrew. Kept in print in England throughout the 1930s, Love on the Dole was soon turned into a play with a hugely successful stage run, starting in Manchester and finishing brilliantly in London's West End. See Constantine, Stephen, “‘Love on the Dole’ and Its Reception in the 1930s,” Literature and History 8 (Autumn 1982): 232–47Google Scholar. Greenwood boasted that, by 1940, 3 million playgoers, including the King and Queen, had seen the dramatic version. Letter to the Manchester Guardian (26 February 1940), 10.

2 The story took three forms in the 1930s: the novel put its emphasis on Harry and his desire for masculine self-sufficiency. The play, written by Greenwood in collaboration with Ronald Gow, shifted the emphasis to Sally, though it changed few of the novel's crucial events. The dramatic version was then rewritten for an American audience, but again most of the scenes and dialogues remained faithful to the novel. See Greenwood, Walter, Love on the Dole (Harmondsworth, 1969)Google Scholar; Gow, Ronald and Greenwood, Walter, Love on the Dole (London, 1935)Google Scholar, and Love on the Dole: A Play in Three Acts (London, 1936)Google Scholar.

3 British Board of Film Censors, “Scenario Reports,” 1936, British Film Institute Library, London, 42, 42a.

4 “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.” Ibid., 42.

5 Ivor Montagu's 1929 pamphlet, The Political Censorship of Films, bears out the presumption that contemporary experts saw cinema and stage as having very different audiences and patterns of reception. Montagu writes: “It is desirable to exercise for the commercial screen more stringent standards than those applicable to the theatre; for a theatre-going public is relatively selective … while the clientele of a given cinema is relatively habitual.” Quoted in Richards, Jeffrey, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1930–1939 (London, 1984), 90Google Scholar. Sarah Street concludes that “the medium of the cinema is clearly … the problem.” British Cinema in Documents (London, 2000), 31Google Scholar.

6 Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace, 112.

7 Quoted in ibid., 116.

8 Constantine makes the case that Greenwood's novel and the dramatic version were not actually radical at all: they were popular with middle-class audiences in the 1930s precisely because the plot merely emphasized a value that could never ruffle middle-class complacency—respectability. But although it is true, as Constantine maintains, that Greenwood's work refrains from condemning the bourgeoisie as responsible for poverty and unemployment and fails to advocate either trade union activity or outright revolution, it certainly offers a stark critique of government indifference and slum-dwelling despair. And in barring it from the cinema, the British Board of Film Censors made it clear that the plot's endorsement of respectability was not enough. See “‘Love on the Dole’ and Its Reception in the 1930s,” 232–47.

9 Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace, 122.

10 Proceedings of the First Meeting of the Film Consultative Committee (26 November 1931), BBFC Verbatim Reports, 1930–31, 4, British Film Institute Library, London.

11 Pronay, Nicholas, “Introduction,” in Propaganda, Politics, and Film, 1918–45, ed. Pronay, Nicholas and Spring, D. W. (London, 1982), 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Quoted in Nicholas Pronay, “The Political Censorship of Films in Britain between the Wars,” in Pronay and Spring, Propaganda, Politics, and Film, 1918–45, 122. In 1938, Geoffrey Mander, a Liberal Member of Parliament and a consistent opponent of censorship, suggested that the government had solved its democratic public relations problem by hiding behind the BBFC: “The British Board of Film Censors … is an unofficial body, and it is extremely convenient that it should be so, because, of course, the Government can say, ‘They have nothing to do with us; they can do anything they like.’ But that does not prevent useful contacts being established with the Government all the same.” Quoted in Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace, 92.

13 Walter Greenwood, letter to the Manchester Guardian, 26 February 1940, 10.

14 Ronald Gow, letter to the Guardian, 3 April 1984, 12.

15 Costume dramas from the thirties include Alexander Korda's The Private Lives of Henry VIII (1933) and Robert Stevenson's Tudor Rose (1936); the best-known thrillers were Alfred Hitchcock's Thirty Nine Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). The decade also featured Gracie Fields and George Formby in a number of low-budget “quota quickies” that borrowed heavily from music-hall conventions, such as Sally in Our Alley (1931), Keep Your Seats Please (1936), and Keep Fit (1937). The focus on aristocrats included such films as Knight without Armour (1937), with Marlene Dietrich as a Russian countess, and Korda's Nell Gwynn (1934), one of a number of films from the period about shopgirls who fall for noblemen.

16 For example, A. Jympson Harman, “New West-End Films,” Evening News, 30 May 1941, 2. Moore Raymond, “New Films,” Sunday Dispatch, 1 June 1941, 2.

17 Jonah Barrington, “New Film,” Daily Express, 31 May 1941, 2.

18 “Love on the Dole: An Outstanding Film,” The Times, 30 May 1941, 6; Edgar Anstey, “The Cinema,” Spectator, 6 June 1941, 607.

19 Lord Beaverbrook reported that “the Prime Minister and Mrs. Churchill … praised it highly” in a letter to G. W. Parish (2 June 1941), Lance Comfort Collection, British Film Institute Library, London.

20 There are no numbers documenting the success of Love on the Dole in cinemas. But Len England, one of the administrators of the Mass-Observation survey, which tried to gather information about British life and habits starting in the 1930s, reported that Love on the Dole was one of a very few films that gave a bleak picture of family life and “one of the biggest box-office failures for years.” Quoted in Mass-Observation at the Movies, ed. Richards, Jeffrey and Sheridan, Dorothy (London, 1987), 298Google Scholar.

21 There is little scholarly consensus about how to define the term propaganda, in part because the scholars who have considered the subject come from an array of fields, including psychology, sociology, communications, history, literary criticism, rhetoric, and even philosophy. There are long-standing debates about whether propaganda always entails falsehood; whether it is always pernicious; and whether it is defined as emanating only from the state—or whether it could include media, education, bureaucracy, and advertising. For a recent account of these debates, see Jowett, Garth and O’Donnell, Victoria, Propaganda and Persuasion (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1999), 1–34Google Scholar. Despite the variation in definition, a common thread in theories of propaganda is an insistence on transparency of message, on immediacy and simplicity: as psychologists Pratkanis, Anthony and Aronson, Elliot write in Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (New York, 1991)Google Scholar, the “classic propaganda formula” involves “a simple image that plays on prejudices and emotions to produce a simple, but nonetheless effective, response” (36); similarly, marketing expert Nicholas Jackson O’Shaugnessy defines propaganda as “generally involv[ing] the unambiguous clarity of message: ‘clarity’ may not be an essential definition of propaganda, but it is certainly a normative one” (Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction [Manchester, 2004], 16)Google Scholar. Communications scholar James Shanahan defines “traditional” propaganda as having “specific purposes and messages that are immediately evident.” Propaganda without Propagandists? (Cresskill, UK, 2001), 5Google Scholar. Love on the Dole is hardly a straightforward and unambiguous example of state propaganda, and so it does not fit most traditional definitions of the term.

22 There is some dispute among film historians about what qualifies as an “official” film. Philip M. Taylor makes the case that every film that appeared during the war was “official”: “The simple fact of the matter was that any film which appeared on British cinema screens during the war could do so only if it had secured the approval of the British government, and in so far as the specific official body responsible was concerned, this meant the Ministry of Information. … Itself the producer of 1887 ‘official’ films, the MoI was also responsible for approving (or otherwise) over 3000 newsreel issues and nearly 400 feature films. In other words, their influence was invariably more real than apparent. … In effect no newspaper article, radio broadcast, or clip of film was allowed to reach the public unless the British government, operating through the MoI, allowed it to do so.” Taylor also notes, however, that there were mistakes that eluded government oversight: see his “Introduction: Film, the Historian, and the Second World War,” in Britain and the Cinema in the Second World War, ed. Taylor, Philip M. (Houndmills, UK, 1988), 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Frances Thorpe and Nicholas Pronay agree that “in strict theory, all films publicly exhibited in Britain during the war were official films because no film could be shown in a public cinema without official approval,” but they add that “the application of the Ministry of Information's wide powers stopped well short of a total direction of the film industry.” British Official Films in the Second World War (Oxford, 1980), 40–41Google Scholar.

23 “Themes on Which Ministerial Statements Are Desirable” (October 1939), The National Archives: Public Record Office (hereafter TNA: PRO), Ministry of Information: Files of Correspondence (hereafter INF) 1/867.

24 Lasswell, Harold, Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927; repr., Cambridge, MA, 1971)Google Scholar; Dewey, John, Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World: Mexico, China, Turkey (New York, 1929)Google Scholar; Ellis, Elmer J., Education against Propaganda (Philadelphia, 1937)Google Scholar.

25 Stanley B. Cunningham argues that before World War I the term propaganda was used infrequently and “the mass phenomenon as we have come to know it” did not exist. After World War II came a dearth of theoretical work on the subject that lasted until the 1980s. The Idea of Propaganda (Westport, CT, 2002), ix, 2Google Scholar. J. Michael Sproule makes the case that analysis of propaganda underwent a “lull” after the Second World War and reemerged in the United States in the 1960s, as the works of theorists such as John Fiske and Michel Foucault “swept onto” the American scene. See his Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion (Cambridge, 2005), 264–68Google Scholar. In Europe, French sociologist Jacques Ellul ushered in a whole new attention to propaganda in the social sciences in the early 1960s, with his Propagandes (Paris, 1962)Google Scholar.

26 Ponsonby, Arthur, M.P., Falsehood in Wartime: Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated throughout the Nations during the Great War (New York, 1928; and London, 1929)Google Scholar.

27 Peterson, H. C., Propaganda for War: The Campaign against American Neutrality, 1914–17 (Norman, OK, 1939), vii, 326Google Scholar. See also Squires, James Duane, British Propaganda at Home and in the United States from 1914 to 1917 (Cambridge, 1935)Google Scholar.

28 M. L. Sanders and Philip M. Taylor argue that the British were particularly successful in their World War I propaganda campaign, but they also point out that the Germans widely exaggerated Britain's canny uses of propaganda in order to broadcast the idea that they had been stabbed in the back, rather than straightforwardly defeated in battle—and so the renowned success of World War I British propaganda was itself the product of a German propaganda campaign. See British Propaganda during the First World War, 1914–18 (London, 1982), 250Google Scholar.

29 Ibid., 248.

30 As Thorpe and Pronay argue, “The element of surprise, especially important in propaganda, had been lost: the British government was now expected to produce sophisticated propaganda devices and everyone at home and abroad would be on the lookout for them.” British Official Films, 5.

31 Lambert, Richard S., Propaganda (London, 1938), 12Google Scholar.

32 According to Lambert, propaganda was appropriate in a democracy in those moments when people had “to act first and think afterwards”—those “pathological states” like “wars, revolutions, and physical and economic disasters.” Ibid.

33 “[Propaganda is] needed least by people that are individualist, trained to think for themselves, and reasonably prosperous. So that we may say with confidence that the more propaganda is used in a country the less does it approach to this ideal state.” Ibid., 8–10.

34 Ibid., 160.

35 British Institute of Public Opinion, “Public Opinion during the Week Ending 30th September 1939,” TNA: PRO INF 1/261.

36 Chapman, James, The British at War: Cinema, State, and Propaganda, 1939–1945 (London, 1998), 46Google Scholar.

37 Professor Gilbert Highet and Mrs. Gilbert Highet, “Memorandum on British Counter-Propaganda” (26 March 1940), TNA: PRO INF 1/848.

38 Sir Stephen Tallents, letter to Sir Warren Fisher (21 December 1938); quoted in McLaine, Ian, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (London, 1979), 13Google Scholar.

39 “German versus British Propaganda” (C.C. paper no. 7, February 1940), TNA: PRO INF 1/867.

40 Bartlett, F. C., Political Propaganda (Cambridge, 1940), 133Google Scholar.

41 Mass-Observation, quoted in Aldgate, Anthony and Richards, Jeffrey, Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema and the Second World War (Oxford, 1986), 23Google Scholar.

42 Gow, letter to the Guardian, 3 April 1984, 12.

43 It does not make sense for Greenwood to have publicly complained about the BBFC after he knew that his novel was going to be made into a film, so his letter almost certainly predated his meeting with “Brookie”—unless, that is, he was already in cahoots with the Ministry of Information and wrote the letter in order to draw attention to the fact that the BBFC was about the lift the ban. I know of no evidence for this latter hypothesis.

44 Minutes of the Co-ordinating Committee (1 April 1940), TNA: PRO INF 1/867.

45 He recommended that British propaganda illustrate “such themes as ‘the price of democracy is eternal vigilance’ and ‘the day of the free ride of freedom is over.’” Grierson, Memorandum (20 September 1939), TNA: PRO INF 1/628. The chairman of the National Committee of the USA on International Intellectual Cooperation agreed, citing “the vital interest which the democracies have at the present time in securing data upon the ways in which they have developed their various institutions under the regime of freedom.” Letter from James T. Shotwell to Lord Lothian (10 October 1939), TNA: PRO INF 1/628.

46 San Francisco Chronicle, 1 November 1939; quoted in “Publicity in the United States” (22 January 1940), TNA: PRO INF 1/848.

47 Gow, letter to the Guardian, 12.

48 Anstey, “The Cinema,” Spectator, 6 June 1941, 607.

49 “A Film to Shake Britain,” Sunday Pictorial, 1 June 1941, 12.

50 Ibid.

51 Spectator, 6 June 1941, 607.

52 Times, 30 May 1941, 6.

53 Daily Express, 31 May 1941, 2.

54 “Minister's Memorandum on General Policy” (30 January 1940), TNA: PRO INF 1/848.

55 Ibid.

56 Mr. Hodson, “Propaganda Policy in the Empire” (C.C. Paper no. 4, January 1940), 4, TNA: PRO INF 1/867.

57 For a fascinating account of British efforts to influence U.S. attitudes toward the war, see Cull, Nicholas John, Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign against American “Neutrality” in World War II (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

58 John Grierson, Memorandum (20 September 1939), TNA: PRO INF 1/628.

59 Ministry of Information Documentary Film List (16 September 1940), TNA: PRO INF 1/629. Grierson got himself in trouble with the Ministry, and his recommendations were not always taken seriously, but his notes from the United States spawned quite a lot of debate.

60 See Selwyn, Francis, Hitler's Englishman: The Crime of “Lord Haw-Haw” (London, 1984)Google Scholar; and Bergmeier, Horst J. P. and Lotz, Rainer, Hitler's Airwaves: The Inside Story of Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing (New Haven, CT, 1997), 84–135CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 According to a Mass-Observation survey, respondents in 1939 complained of an “over-emphasis on the Ministry of Information as source of news.” The survey concluded that “the great mass of listeners now believe that the BBC has lost the objectivity and independence on which its news reputation was founded.” “Mass-Observation Survey of Attitudes toward the War” (11 October 1939), TNA: PRO INF 1/261. The Ministry of Information employed the services of Mass-Observation reporters and other nongovernmental research services at the beginning of the war but worried that they would be discovered and accused of domestic “political espionage.” “Minute on ‘Use of Mass-Observation’ and ‘British Institute of Public Opinion’” (27 September 1939), TNA: PRO INF 1/261. The scandal over “Cooper's Snoopers” in the summer of 1940 bore out this fear.

62 “Hamburg Broadcast Propaganda: An Enquiry into the Extent and Effect of Its Impact on the British Public during Mid-Winter 1939/40,” conducted by the BBC's Listener Research Section and submitted to the Ministry of Information in March of 1940, TNA: PRO INF 1/867, 5.

63 “Hamburg Broadcast Propaganda,” TNA: PRO INF 1/867, 1, 14, 16.

64 “Hamburg Broadcast Propaganda,” TNA: PRO INF 1/867, 16.

65 Oliver Bell, “Memorandum to the Films Division of the Ministry of Information” (17 January 1940), TNA: PRO INF 1/615. Bell was sitting on the Committee for Overseas Publicity in January 1940 and thus was part of the Ministry. Kenneth Clark later called Bell “a muddle-headed busy-body” and eventually ousted him. See the memo from Clark to Lord Hood (14 May 1940), TNA: PRO INF 1/615.

66 Highet and Highet, “Memorandum on British Counter-Propaganda” (26 March 1940), TNA: PRO INF 1/848.

67 Aldgate and Richards, Britain Can Take It, 15.

68 “Minister's Memorandum on General Policy” (30 January 1940), TNA: PRO INF 1/848.

69 Lambert, Propaganda, 12.

70 Bartlett, Political Propaganda, 8.

71 Ibid., viii.

72 Ibid., 117.

73 “Themes on which Ministerial Statements Are Desirable” (October 1939), TNA: PRO INF 1/867.

74 British Institute of Public Opinion, “Public Opinion during the Week Ending 30th September 1939,” TNA: PRO INF 1/261.

75 Bartlett, Political Propaganda, 138.

76 Hodson, “Propaganda Policy in the Empire” (C.C. Paper no. 4, January 1940), 4, TNA: PRO INF 1/867.

77 Quotation from Highet and Highet, “Memorandum on British Counter-Propaganda” (26 March 1940), TNA: PRO INF 1/848. As Bartlett put it, “the unrestricted publication of news would … often be of service to an enemy.” This meant that “not even the most democratic State can, or ever will be able to, get on without a form of censorship.” Propaganda, 134–35.

78 “Everywhere propaganda must be based on facts, revealed as fully, as accurately and as rapidly as possible. In many parts of the Empire the British authorities are suspected of suppressing facts. … [Propaganda efforts] are liable to collapse like a house of cards if they are not based on ample and rapidly revealed fact.” Hodson, “Propaganda Policy in the Empire” (C.C. Paper no. 4, January 1940), 4, TNA: PRO INF 1/867.

79 Ministry of Information Co-ordination Committee Meeting (1 November 1939), TNA: PRO INF 1/867.

80 For example, in the summer of 1940, “despite the prodigious armaments drive then under way, it was far from certain whether Britain possessed enough arms to repel a successfully landed German force. But the propagandists can hardly be blamed for putting out information to the contrary, since only a government bent on surrender would have admitted the dearth of arms at that time.” McLaine, Ministry of Morale, 76.

81 “Two Films of the Month,” Documentary News Letter, July 1941, 135.

82 Taylor, “Introduction,” 9.

83 Chapman, The British at War, 182.

84 Aldgate and Richards, Britain Can Take It, 219.

85 Stead, Peter, “The People as Stars: Feature Films as National Expression,” in Britain and the Cinema in the Second World War, ed. Taylor, Philip M. (Houndmills, UK, 1988), 66Google Scholar.

86 Thorpe and Pronay, British Official Films, 9. Chapman explains that there is some debate about how much Bartlett influenced the Ministry but claims that Clark's agenda was “broadly in line with the liberal academic discourse.” The British at War, 55.

87 A. E. Wilson, “Slump Film Is Uplifting,” The Star, 29 May 1941, 6.

88 “A Film to Shake Britain,” Sunday Pictorial, 1 June 1941, 12; Ian Coster, “This Film Is One of Britain's Best,” Evening Standard, 31 May 1941, 6. The reporter added: “It even has the courage to avoid a happy ending.”

89 “Film Notes,” News of the World, 1 June 1941, 6.

90 Thorpe and Pronay, British Official Films, 21, 25.

91 Dilys Powell, Films since 1939 (1947), quoted in Murphy, Robert, British Cinema and the Second World War (London, 2000), 63Google Scholar.

92 Kenneth Clark, “Programme for Film Propaganda” (C.C. Paper no. 1, January 1940), TNA: PRO INF 1/867.

93 Ibid.

94 P. L. Mannock, Kinematograph Weekly, 28 September 1939, 19.

95 Lambert, Propaganda, 12–13.

96 Minutes of a Co-Ordination Conference of Directors of Divisions (14 September 1939), TNA: PRO INF 1/867. In May of 1940, the Ministry noted that “the leading film producing companies continue to make films of propaganda value in consultation with the Division.” Note for Inclusion in General Report to the Cabinet: Films Division, Ministry of Information Progress Report (May 1940), TNA: PRO INF 1/5. The Ministry also worked through American reporters rather than seeming to impose British perspectives on U.S. audiences. Brewer, Susan A., To Win the Peace: British Propaganda in the United States during World War II (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 7Google Scholar.

97 Quoted in Chapman, The British at War, 21.

98 Memorandum on the Production of Propaganda Material for Commercial Distribution (17 May 1940), TNA: PRO INF 1/533.

99 Undated letter from Sir Joseph Ball to Admiral Usborne, probably from September 1939, TNA: PRO INF 1/178.

100 Minutes of the Committee of Films for Overseas Publicity Meeting (19 January 1940), TNA: PRO INF 1/629.

101 The Social Survey, “The Cinema Audience” (June–July 1943), TNA: PRO RG-23.

102 Taylor argues that “by 1942 the MoI was operating such an effective system of censorship that even the majority of those 20 to 30 million weekly cinema-goers were unaware of the extent to which the images before them were being controlled by the government.” “Introduction,” 7.

103 Clark, “Programme for Film Propaganda” (C.C. Paper no. 1, January 1940), TNA: PRO INF 1/867.

104 Quoted in Aldgate and Richards, Britain Can Take It, 26.

105 Chapman, The British at War, 19.

106 Ibid., 70–82.

107 Ibid., 68.

108 Ibid., 82.

109 To the public at the time, the Ministry seemed inept and embarrassingly chaotic, and it was called “The Ministry of Muddle.” The poor morale of the staff was notorious, and “complete unsuitability” was said to be the major justification for employment. Since Ian McLaine's Ministry of Morale, the first scholarly account to argue that wartime morale was far shakier than subsequent invocations of the “Dunkirk spirit” would imply, many scholars have reinforced the public perception of a hopelessly incompetent and rudderless unit. McLaine maintains that “for nearly two years [1939–41] the measures taken by the propagandists were unnecessary and inept, based … on misunderstanding and mistrust of the British public which, in turn, were products of the class and background of the propagandists themselves” (10–11). Philip M. Taylor contends that it was the low British opinion of propaganda that led to the slow development of propaganda techniques: see The Projection of Britain (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar. And more recently, Cull makes the case that the “early failures of the MoI became legendary” for good reason: the appointment of Lord Macmillan as Minister, who had no publicity experience whatsoever, was particularly damaging. See Cull's Selling War, 38–39. But a strain of dissent has also emerged, suggesting a more complex account of the Ministry's decisions. Mariel Grant argues that the government was committed to developing publicity but resistant to centralizing those efforts between the wars: Propaganda and the Role of the State in Inter-War Britain (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar; James Chapman invites us to rethink the success of the Films Division of the Ministry of Information in The British at War; and Susan A. Brewer, in To Win the Peace, shows that Britain was following a complex “No Propaganda” policy, which seriously hampered Ministry efforts both at home and abroad.

110 Cull explains that given the widespread fear of propaganda in the United States, American broadcasters deliberately presented “an affectionate picture of a crusty liberal Britain muddling through the war, congenitally incapable of efficient propaganda and insistent on preserving the rights of genuine conscientious objectors.” Selling the War, 45.

111 In his unpublished memoirs, Baxter suggests that he was responsible for the uplifting and patriotic message of the film as it eventually appeared. “Many had thought this was not a suitable subject for wartime, and in fact appeared just the opposite of the policy of laughter which I was endeavouring to follow. But I felt that the successful outcome of the war depended in no small measure on the loyalty and hard work of … ‘the working man.’ … In some strange way I felt this subject was something special.” Quoted in Geoff Brown with Aldgate, Tony, The Common Touch: The Films of John Baxter (London, 1989), 78Google Scholar. Baxter and the other directors who worked for British National Films typically raved about the freedom allowed to them by producer J. Arthur Rank, who claimed to know little about film and so rarely interfered with any work in progress. As Michael Wakelin argues, Rank was so “safe” financially that “he was able to give freedom to his creative workforce that no other situation would have been able to.” J. Arthur Rank: The Man behind the Gong (Oxford, 1996), 66Google Scholar. All of this suggests that the propaganda messages within the film were Baxter's initiative. On the other hand, it is worth noting that Rank was close to some Conservative party insiders who wanted to see the British film industry transformed, that British National Films had a consistently patriotic agenda, that Rank supported realism in film and had contempt for Hollywood as “Fairyland,” and that, during the war, when “there were severe shortages of everything from raw stock to studio space … Rank seemed to have the lion's share of what was on offer.” Macnab, Geoffrey, J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry (London, 1993), 42Google Scholar. All of these details hint that Rank and the Ministry might possibly have colluded behind the scenes.

112 “The Movies,” New Statesman and Nation, 7 June 1941, 578.

113 Love on the Dole, videocassette, directed by John Baxter (London: British National Films, 1941; distributed by Video Yesteryear, 1998).

114 In 1943, the latter message became clearer when the film was reissued with a written postscript by A. V. Alexander, Minister of Defense, which read: “No longer will the unemployed become the forgotten men of peace.” Programme Notes for Love on the Dole, National Film Theatre, 1984, British Film Institute Library, London.

115 British Board of Film Censors, “Scenario Reports,” 1936, British Film Institute Library, London, 42.

116 Bell, Memorandum to the Films Division of the Ministry of Information (17 January 1940), TNA: PRO INF 1/615.

117 Clark, “Programme for Film Propaganda” (C.C. Paper no. 1, January 1940), TNA: PRO INF 1/867.

118 A. Jympson Harman, “New West-End Films,” Evening News, 30 May 1941, 2.

119 For further discussion of British film and wartime propaganda, see Jo Fox's article in this issue, “Millions Like Us? Accented Language and the ‘Ordinary’ in British Films of the Second World War,” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 4 (October 2006): 819–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.