Table Of ContentHistory through the Newsreel: the 1930s
Series Editor: Nicholas Pronay
The Unemployed
Arthur Marwick
Professor of History, The Open University
Peter Wenham
General Adviser, History and Social Studies, Leeds Council
Department of Education
Macmillan Education
for The Historical Association
Editorial Board of The Historical Association for History Through the
Newsreel
Professor J. A. S. Grenville (Chairman)
Professor of Modern History, University of Birmingham
Professor H Hearder
Professor of Modern History, University of Wales at Cardiff
Brian Haworth
Principal Lecturer, Padg ate College of Education
Professor A. Marwick
Professor of History, The Open University
John Standen
Principal Lecturer in History, Gypsy Hill College of Education
Peter Wenham
General Adviser, History and Social Studies,
Leeds Council Department of Education
Series Editor:
Nicholas Pronay
Lecturer in Modern History, University of Leeds
© Macmillan Education Ltd 1976
First published 1976
Macmillan Education Ltd
Houndmills Basingstoke Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Associated companies in New York, Dublin, Melbourne
Johannesburg and Delhi
Notes for Teachers SBN 333 19363 6
Film SBN 333 18553 6
ISBN 978-1-349-02866-5 ISBN 978-1-349-02864-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-02864-1
Contents
Introduction 1
Nicholas Pronay
The unemployed 4
Arthur Marwick
The newsreels in the classroom 13
Peter Wenham
Transcript of the newsreel commentary 22
Select bibliography 27
History through the Newsreel:
an introduction
The fllms comprising this series contain extracts from newsreels which
were seen by the British public during the 1930s. They provide original
source material for use in a wide range of courses and are suitable for
use with pupils of mixed abilities. The Hlms are suitable for examination
and non-examination courses at thirteen-plus, sixteen-plus, and
eighteen-plus, studying the interwar period in History. They can be used
in General Studies and in Humanities, for broadly-based courses in
Contemporary Studies, Politics and Government, where there is reference
to the role of mass-communications in the modern world. The Hlms
and the booklets which form the series have been designed with the
needs of the classroom specifically in mind. They were produced by
teams consisting of an academic historian who is a specialist in the
subject and an experienced teacher, working closely with the series
editor, a specialist in the history of political communications. The series
was initiated by The Historical Association in response to the need for
teacher-orientated and academically sound audio-visual source materials
for the study of the twentieth century and it is produced jointly with
Macmillan Education.
Newsreels were the predecessors of today's television news. In the
1930s they already reached about half the total population of Britain
and were regularly seen by most working-class people under 30. Their
impact was revolutionary. For the first time in history, the majority of
the ordinary people could see faraway events and hear the famous men
of their day 'with their own eyes and own ears'. The newsreels
contributed to the increasing involvement of ordinary people in politics.
They initiated the age of the mass media and began a process of change
in the relationship between the public and government (continued
today by television).
As historical records the newsreels preserved in the archives are very
important. They help us to put ourselves into the shoes of the people
who lived at the time and to see problems, personalities and events as
they saw them-just as television news today provides a view of the
problems which we have to try to solve. Newsreels are especially
important records for British history because here the government was
elected by universal adult suffrage and policies depended to an
exceptional degree on the ability of the government to carry the
country with it. The newsreels are also useful records from the teaching 1
point of view, because they were designed in the first place to be
intelligible to ordinary people and to appeal to a basically young
audience. Their language is simple and direct and therefore they can be
used readily with a very wide range (in terms of age/ability) of pupils.
For younger or less able pupils the Hlms may be used to stimulate
interest in the period and the people who lived in it. Those people saw
these Hlms as their window on the world; the window survives and it
allows us to see the world as they saw it. In history courses leading to
examinations at sixteen-plus or eighteen-plus, the series can be used to
stimulate a more empathetic and realistic understanding of the problems
of the 1930s. The Hlms themselves should lead the class to consider
how these problems appeared to contemporaries and the booklets
should help in considering how far people and governments in the
1930s were in a position to recognise and understand them. The news
reel records are presented substantially unaltered. They may be readily
used also as historical sources for project work in connection with
newspapers and other contemporary material.
The series can be further used to stimulate inquiry into the nature
and problems of historical understanding and method. The pupils
should be able to compare what we now know from historical
documents to have been happening at the time, with what contemp
oraries were shown and told. This could be used to lead to discussion
of the different kinds of information and understanding which
contemporaries and historians can have. Pupils will also be able to
compare and contrast what written records can tell about the past with
what films and other audio-visual records such as television reveal.
Finally with abler or older pupils these Hlms can be used to raise some
fundamental questions about the nature of contemporary information
and historical evidence in the age of the Communications Revolution.
The creation and impact of popular myths by wishful reporting and
deliberate propaganda are two such problems. The respective places of
television, radio and ftlms on the one hand and written records, news
papers and historical books on the other, are central problems today.
What ways do we have, or not have, of 'finding out for ourselves'?
At all levels of teaching the combination of readily understandable
language and visual techniques, already familiar to children brought up
on television, with the provision of original record material, should
help considerably with a 'skills and records' approach to the study of
history.
The cinema newsreel in the 1930s had already developed many of
the techniques used today for presenting the news. The pupils should
be able to recognise most of the techniques in the simpler terms used
in the 1930s and identify the more sophisticated forms in use today in
2 television news. Thus, apart from an empathetic understanding of the
1930s the series provides important source material and a historical
perspective for understanding the modern techniques of news selection
and presentation and also of propaganda. It can be used to develop
critical awareness of the use of archival ftlm in modern historical
'documentaries' as much as the use of actuality ftlms in contemporary
documentary and news programmes. An analytical understanding of
newsreels in addition helps us to understand the main source of
information which we have about the world around us (for more than
three-quarters of the British people today, according to the latest
audience research figures, regard television as their primary source of
information).
These ftlms should help pupils to examine the differences between
information and interpretation, and to distinguish fact from opinion.
The four films making up History Through the Newsreel have been
conceived as cumulative rather than interconnected. The first ftlm in
particular has been designed to provide a basic introduction and it
should materially help in making the fullest use of the others. Its aim is
to demonstrate how news and political information were communicated,
how the fully-developed newsreel operated, and in what general context
the news stories collected in the other ftlms originally appeared. The
other ftlms cover three central problems of the 1930s: the unemployed,
Nazi Germany, and the threat of total war. Each ftlm is self-contained
and may be used singly to illuminate its particular subject, though
maximum benefit would be derived from using them successively in the
following order:
News and the Newsreel
The Unemployed
Nazi Germany
If War Should Come.
3
The unemployed
The biggest single social problem of the 1930s, and one which has
continued to haunt politics and industrial relations ever since, was that
of the unemployed. Following the economic and political crisis of 1931,
unemployment rose rapidly to a peak of 2 355 000 in January 1933; it
stood at just under two-and-a-half-million in August 1933, and did not
fall below two million till July 1935-. A year later, the total number of
unemployed was sti111.6 million, twelve per cent of the insured working
population, and it remained at this figure until after the outbreak of the
Second World War. Unemployment has always been a feature of
industrial society, and indeed of most pre-industrial societies. The
number out of work had not fallen below a million throughout the
1920s, but it was in the thirties that the problem of the long-term
unemployed became really serious. At the end of the twenties only five
or six out of every hundred unemployed men had been out of work for
a year or more, and these were mainly concentrated in the coal industry
which had been in a disastrous condition since the General Strike of
1926. In 1932 one-fifth of all the unemployed had had no work for a
year or more and early in 1933 the long-term unemployed totalled
450000. Though statistically relatively insignificant, unemployment
in the thirties touched the middle-classes as well as manual workers.
It used to be customary to blame the politicians and industrial
leaders for their part in creating the tragedy of the depression. More
recently some economic historians have argued that the economic
strategies of the 1930s were less unsuccessful than used to be main
tained, and that there was a very real industrial recovery from the
middle of the decade. It should also be noted that the depression was a
world-wide phenomenon, triggered off by the American stock market
crash of 1929 and spread by the Central European banking collapse of
1931, which directly affected Great Britain. The whole delicate
mechanism of international trade, which had depended so heavily upon
mutual trust between countries, and, above all, upon a faith in the
solvency of British financial institutions, had been undermined by the
First World War. On a more fundamental level, world-wide economic
and technological developments were running against the old heavy
industries which had formed the British industrial base for so long-coal
mining, large sections of the iron and steel industry, heavy engineering,
4 and shipbuilding. International competition, too, had deprived the
long-established Lancashire cotton industry of a large proportion of its
markets.
Businessmen, of course, argued that the fault lay not with them, but
with the loss of markets. The media tended to follow this line (even in
programmes broadly sympathetic to the workers such as Geoffrey
Bridson and Joan Littlewood's radio documentary of 1936, Cotton
People), arguing rather simplistically for import restrictions and a
nationwide effort to 'Buy British'. But the less pleasant face of large
scale private enterprise was to be seen in such combinations as The
British Iron and Steel Federation and the National Shipbuilders Security,
both of which were founded with government encouragement. When
the steel mills at Mossend in Scotland and Dowlais in Wales were
completely shut down, it seemed, understandably, to local people that
they were being thrown on the scrap heap at the behest of some face
less men in London. The shipyards, upon which the bulk of the male
population of J arrow depended for a livelihood, were shut down by the
National Shipbuilders Security; when local efforts wert made to launch
an alternative light steel industry, they were stifled by the British Iron
and Steel Federation. }arrow's Labour MP, Ellen Wilkinson, was scarcely
exaggerating when she wrote of The Town that Was Murdered.
J. M. Keynes, generally regarded as the greatest economist of the
twentieth century, did not publish his major work on the General
Theory of Employment, Interest and Money til11936. Perhaps it would
be unfair to blame politicians before that for not being aware of his
theory that the government itself must ensure that overall spending and
investment is kept at a sufficient level to ensure full employment of all
the resources of the community. On the other hand, the Independent
Labour Party (a small group within the Labour Party, which broke away
from it in 1932) had in the 1920s argued the case for a living wage which
would provide enough purchasing power to maintain full employment.
Also, in 1928 Lloyd George and the Liberals had published their Yellow
Book advocating government expenditure on public works (though
many Liberal MPs were in fact vehemently opposed to any such policies).
Recently it has been argued, particularly by Robert Skidelsky, that Sir
Oswald Mosley, a member of the minority Labour Government in 1929
and 1930, was the one potential political leader who would have carried
through the necessary policies of stimulating spending and investment.
Given Mosley's erratic political behaviour, this is in my view a highly
contentious statement, though it would certainly be unfair to judge
Mosley on the evidence of a single newsreel story, taken one week after
Mosley's resignation from the Labour Government.
This minority Labour Government had to meet the full force of what
was described by the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, as an 'economic
blizzard'. The immediate short-term problem was to stop the run on the 5
pound and try to raise an American loan, thereby restoring confidence
in Britain's economic stability. One reason for the loss of confidence
was that the Unemployment Insurance Fund, out of which unemploy
ment benefits were paid, was running into the red. Established govern
ment and civil service attitudes to unemployment benefits were based
on the principles of sound insurance, in other words that a man should
only receive benefits for as long as he had an 'entitlement' on the basis
of contributions already made. The Unemployment Insurance Fund,
financed out of contributions from employees, employers and govern
ment, was intended to be self-supporting; but very high unemployment
put too great a strain on it.
The private American bank of J. Pierpont Morgan would grant a loan
only if the government tried to stem the drain on the Fund by a ten per
cent reduction in unemployment benefits. On this issue the Labour
Government split, and the cuts were carried through by the new National
Government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, but in which the
Conservatives formed a majority. This National Government, later
headed by Stanley Baldwin, and fmally by Neville Chamberlain, was in
office throughout the decade. It is probably true to say that, with a few
minor exceptions, its deliberate policies did little to reduce unemploy
ment. Whether, given the state of economic knowledge at the time, it
should have done more, is less easy to determine.
However, government economic policies in the face of the depression
are only one part of the problem. The other part concerns provision
made by the government, through unemployment benefits and other
means, for the unemployed. Most of the dramas in the history of the
unemployed in the 1930s centred on this aspect of government policy.
The first thing the new Ramsay MacDonald National Government
did was to make reductions in the weekly benefit rates. An adult man
was now to get 15s 3d (about 76p) instead of 17s, while his wife's
allowance was reduced from 9s to 8s (40p); the child's allowance
remained at 2s (lOp). At the same time insurance stamp contributions
for men in work were increased from 7d to lOd (about 4p); the
employer's contribution was also raised slightly from 8d to lOd, and
the contribution from the government was increased by 2%d to lOd.
There had always been a great deal of fuss in the extreme right-wing
press over the so-called 'anomalies', by which, it was argued, the
unemployed were receiving more from the taxpayer than they were
entitled to. One of the particular tragedies of the whole period of heavy
unemployment was the way in which solid Labour men, themselves still
lucky enough to be in employment, often tended to become suspicious
of the unemployed. The government's second step was to introduce
new Anomalies Regulations, whose main effect was to stop about
6 134 000 married women from collecting full benefit (as distinct from
