The MoI shorts made during the Second World War were born directly out of documentary movement and involved many of the same filmmakers. Eight MoI shorts were made primarily about shipbuilding over the course of the war. The films were used to emphasise the importance of the industry to the war effort, reassure the public that the country’s shipbuilding capacity could meet the needs of war, for recruitment and to a limited extent to advocate a better future for the yards after the war.
The MoI films407 on the subject of shipbuilding emphasised the long tradition of the
industry in Britain’s regions. The most thought-provoking of these was Tyneside
Story (1943), which looked to the future of the industry after the war and, as will be
seen, paralleled the message of Baxter’s The Shipbuilders. The short begins in the yards left derelict by the Depression looking at the history of the area, concluding that the ‘history of the Tyne is the history of building ships in prosperity and adversity’. It emphasised the skill of the men and their pride in their work. One man, running his own shop, is told by his wife that he would be mad to go back, now that they have a good business, but he replies: ‘...I worked in the yards for thirty years and I learned a trade, a trade where a man can show his skill - anyone can do this job’.
405 Bellamy, The Shipbuilders, p. 182.
406 British Movietone News, No. 252A, British Movietone News 276A. It was also the subject of a number of documentaries, for example: Heavy Industries (1936) which detailed the building of the ship, and Wonder Ship (1936) which documented her maiden voyage.
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The film recognised the difficulties in manning the yards, with the lack of skilled workers available, men away in the forces or working in alternative occupations. It was aimed at recruitment and in particular in attracting women to the workforce. According to Johnman and Murphy, however, there was considerable antagonism
towards women working in the yards.408 The film puts a positive gloss on this
showing women training in the yards with one of the female welders described ‘as good as any of the men’.
There were indications in the film that the recall to the yards was not altogether welcomed: some workers were happily settled in new positions. Some resented the fact that they had been turned away in the 1930s when they were desperate for jobs, and they feared this would be repeated at the end of the war once the immediate demand for ships was over. This was underlined at the end of the film. The narrator speaking over stirring music eulogising the work of the Tyneside yards is interrupted by a shot of a worker who questions:
Ah but wait a minute. Tyneside’s busy enough today, old ‘uns and young ‘uns hard at work, making good ships, but just remember what the yards looked like five years ago: idle, empty, some of them derelict and the skilled men that worked in them scattered and forgotten. Will it be the same five years from now? That’s what we on Tyneside want to know.
It is not surprising that the film stopped short of looking at the tensions within the industry, including the many instances of strikes even though emergency legislation
had made such action illegal.409 There were, however, instances in other MoI shorts
that hinted at difficulties in industrial relations, although in such a way as to offer reassurance of the loyalty of the workers to the war effort. For example in
Shipbuilders (1940) the commentator, interviewing a riveter, comments, ‘you’re
known as the black squad410 of the boiler makers’ union aren’t you?’ The riveter
replies: ‘We are, but believe me we are white when trouble comes along and at
408Johnman and Murphy, Shipbuilding and the State since 1918, p. 67. According to Martin Bellamy most women were forced to leave the yards at the end of the war, although there were traditionally two roles that were fulfilled by women: tracing plans to make blueprints and French-polishing furniture for the ships. Bellamy, The Shipbuilders, p .22. There was also a superstition that it was unlucky for the future of ship to have women in construction areas. Rodgers, Feminine Power at Sea, p. 3.
409 Johnman and Murphy, Shipbuilding and the State since 1918, p. 70. 410
What became known as the ‘black squad’ was made up of riveters, welders, burners, platers, caulkers and shipwrights.
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present we are working like the very devil to beat our common enemy’. In the 1944
Clydebuilt there is rather a curious speech, just after a ship launch by one of the
workers (possibly a foreman or a union representative), appealing to everyone to work together, although there has been no indication in the film that they were not:
There is one thing we must never forget at any time, never to fall out with each other, but work with each other as much as we can, as only that way can we ever attain the ideal of smashing fascism.
Most of the shorts used a similar format in using workers speaking directly to camera and notably did not portray shipyard owners, unlike all the fictional films which heavily featured them as paternalistic nurturers of their workers. The emphasis was upon the workers as highly skilled craftsmen, enthusiastic to engage with new
technology and committed to the war effort.411 Not only were the workers the most
skilled in the world, British ships were the best in the world and this was the result of a long tradition. Nearly all the shorts began with history: the long view by reference to Britain’s long association with the sea: the short view by reference to the Depression and: more personal history by reference to familial ties with generations of the same
family shown working within the yards.412 For example the commentator in Steel
Goes to Sea (1941) comments:
[Britain] is fitted by nature to be the birth place of ships...The skill and craft of shipbuilding is a tradition which carries on beyond the span of any man’s life... it must be handed down from one to another, from father to son, from brother to brother.
And from Shipbuilders (1940):
It was the work of men such as these that defeated the Spanish Armada; it was their work that shattered Napoleon’s dreams of world conquest. Their work will bring back the world again to sanity...These are the men with 1000 years of craftsmanship behind them.
411
This was the propaganda message but Barnett has argued that tradition ‘fossilised’ the industry. See Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War: The Illusion of Britain as a Great Nation (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 107-124.
412 Shipyard workforces were hierarchical and promotion nearly impossible, therefore apprenticeships in the skilled trades were highly valued and operated on patronage. This meant that many sons followed their fathers into the yards.
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As this indicates, while genuine difficulties within the industry were not totally obscured, the overall view of the worker was highly romanticised and couched in a familiar rhetoric, often rooted in naval tradition. The keynotes of naval tradition that is prowess and familial tie were easily transposed to make ‘heroes’ of shipyard workers. Not only had Britain led the world in shipbuilding and sea power, the yards were genuinely manned by generations of the same family but ships themselves had been powerfully promoted as symbols of national pride and technological advancement.
A practiced ‘authenticity’, rooted in the documentary movement, was prominent in these films. The techniques of filming on location, using workers speaking directly to camera and re-enacting activities were also used in the MoI shorts that featured the fishing industry during the war. They were subject to a similar rhetoric that emphasised skill and tradition. For example, the narrator of Sailors without Uniform (1940) states:
A large part of the destiny of Great Britain and the British people has been shaped by the fishing tradition. They have learnt their trade; they have been brought up on the tradition of the sea... like their fathers and grandfathers before them...and now that Great Britain together with her allies has taken up arms...the British fishing community as they did in the last Great War is supplying the men and the boats in the service of her country...and this they are doing with the same cheerful camaraderie that they go about their peacetime occupation...In Britain today, no matter to what class a man belongs, there is evidence as never before of a quiet determination to crush this German war of aggression, no matter what the cost, and there’s no flag wagging and very little noise.
As this indicates there was a largely homogeneous approach towards workers in the maritime industries on film. This tended to flatten the nuances of both regional diversity and the traditions of different occupations. Other than regional accents the
Tyneside Story could easily have been that of Greenock, Barrow or Dublin.
Similar rhetoric was carried over into fictional film, most particularly in The Man at
the Gate (1941) set in a fishing village. The central message is one of keeping faith
particularly in dealing with loss and sacrifice, with the linchpin of the movie being the King’s 1939 Christmas broadcast. In this he quotes from the poem that is the
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inspiration for the film, The Gate of the Year.413 It emphasised family ties, the
tradition of Britons as seafarers and duty to country. But, as the Monthly Film
Bulletin’s criticism of the film indicated, there was now an expectation that fiction
films of the sea would follow the lines of documentary style:
The ordinary English life and settings will probably make this film popular, but those who remember the same director’s Turn of the Tide will regret he should have ignored the work done in the documentary field in the six intervening years and be content with trying to repeat his former success.414
Common elements in the representation of maritime industries were to be found regardless of genre, crossing over comedies, dramas and the information film. First there was a certain romanticisation of the worker in a tight knit community. Second was an emphasis on the unique skills of the workers passed through the family line and the debt owed to them by the whole country. Third, the documentary style became the dominant mode of representation of maritime industries. These aspects were forcefully projected by the only major fictional representation of shipbuilding during the war.