Getting the Message

J ust in time for the collectionat 2.45 p.m., a small boy slips a postcard into a pillar-box in the middle of Manchester. After sorting in the Manchester office, the card makes its way by train to London and then by ‘motor-van’ to Redhill in Surrey. By 5 a.m. it has arrived at Petworth in West Sussex and by 7 a.m. another van has brought it to the village of Graffham, which lies (as an invisible narrator informs us in the King’s English) ‘under the edges of the Downs’. Mr Money, the local postman, collects the card with the other post from Mr Pescod, the postmaster at the sub-post office that doubles as village grocery. When Mr Money has cycled his nine-mile round he still has the boy’s postcard, which is addressed to an outlying farm. ‘Tegleaze Farm is up over the top of the Downs and to get to it Mr Money has to walk’, we’re told, ‘about three quarters of a mile up through the beechwoods with a stiff short cut through the saplings.’ We are shown brief but lyrical shots of a landscape that could have been painted by Eric Ravilious. At 9.30 a.m. the postcard is delivered to a not especially grateful-looking woman. It says: ‘Dear Aunty, Thank you very much for your letter. It must be nice to be in the country. Jim.’

This is the six-minute film Penny Journey: The Story of a Postcard from Manchester to Graffham,made for the General Post Office (GPO) by its own film unit in 1938 and directed by the then little-known Humphrey Jennings. It’s an effective piece of government propaganda – the GPO itself was at that time a department of government – though Triumph of the Willit certainly isn’t. (Decades later, the Royal Mail would sponsor the children’s television programme Postman Pat, and it’s not hard to see where the inspiration came from.) The film quietly promotes the efficiency, dedication, and low cost of the national postal service, but also tells us that urban and rural lives are vitally connected. It’s certainly very nice to be in the countryside that constitutes ‘Deep England’ (as Angus Calder called it in The Myth of the Blitz) – but the city isn’t so bad either. And above all, it’s nice to be in thiscountry, where the postal needs of polite if reticent boys – needs that stand metonymically for the much wider communication requirements of a modern mass society – are so diligently catered for. The film is certainly no masterpiece, especially by the standards subsequently set by its talented young director, but it’s a typical GPO production.

Under the leadership of first John Grierson and then Alberto Cavalcanti, the GPO Film Unit was to produce some of the most innovative British documentary films of the interwar period, including perhaps most conspicuously the much-loved Night Mail(1936), co-directed by Harry Watt and Basil Wright. Between its inception in 1933, and its metamorphosis into the Crown Film Unit in 1940 – under the wartime control of the Ministry of Information (MOI) – the GPO unit would produce more than a hundred titles. All the same, it was but one among a number of documentary units operating in the 1930s. These encompassed both corporate film units (including those operated by ICI, Shell, and London Midland and Scottish Railway) and other independent units that sought corporate...