'Nightmail' and Blackheath Arts Club as a film studio

 

Reading reviews of new films there is one particular new film -one which I would very much like to see but missed it when it was in Greenwich – about which all the reviews are saying that the entire audience is in tears at the end of it!   Well I’m not one to cry in films, but there is one which will give me a little sniffle and perhaps a tear- but it’s not a drama. It’s something a bit eccentric and old and why I’m raising it here is that it was very partly made in Blackheath.

Now saying it was made in Blackheath is going to be a big giveaway because it’s such a famous film and so many people will know instantly what I mean.

Only five or six years ago there was a big meeting with an advertised lecture about the organisation which made this film.  I remember going one evening to Blackheath Village and finding a roadway which I never  knew  about, which went to a church which I never knew about , which had a huge great hall which was packed with people -probably hundreds of them  They had all come to hear a talk about that very film.   It was actually a very disappointing evening and the lecture wasn’t at all about what I’d hoped for but it says something about the popularity and enthusiasm for this old made-in-the -1930s film.

However it was made in Blackheath so perhaps I need to go and see what the sadly late Neil Rhind has to say about the building that it was made in. He put a wonderful clear description of it in Vol I of his book about ’Blackheath Village and its Environs’. Its – as I’m sure you guessed by now –the Blackheath Arts Club building at the end of Bennett Park, (and can I quickly note that Bennett Park was named after John Bennett, Greenwich clock and watchmaker). 

Blackheath Arts Club building is now flats like everywhere else. Some years ago I was able to join an organised visit to see inside the foyer - and thank you to the residents who were very kind to us visitors and nuisances.

The Club was set up in 1883 to enable social interactions among gentlefolk interested in science, literature, painting and music.  The idea was to let out space in the building as studios for local artists. It was designed by Hicks and Rudkin and the President of the Club was Professor Frederick Abel himself, having a break from developing some of the nastier high explosives at the Arsenal.

The Art School also did very well and there were many events – poetry readings for example. They were careful to have nothing too popular.  They had regular art exhibitions although Neil Rhind comments that works by these Blackheath artists have on the whole not survived outside brief entries in reference books.  Anyway there was a lively world there of well off people doing things in Blackheath –here was a camera club, a debating club and a badminton club. All went well until the Great War. The last exhibition was a Spring Show in April 1916 but after that the building was requisitioned for Government use. 

After the war the remaining activists were unable to get themselves together again to be an Art Club in the way that it had been. There were various attempts to get it going again all of which failed.  There were then attempts to let out the building.  Then in   1931 it was taken over by the GPO Film Studio and, as Neil commented “without their vision the cinema and television we watch today would be considerably worse than it is”.  The GPO Film Studios had developed from an organisation called the Empire Marketing Board which was trying to promote research into all sorts of food supplies.  The first director of the film unit was John  Grierson. I hope everybody’s heard of him because he is quite famous and very important. There is an archive of his work at Stirling University and apparently an exhibition was held there in the autumn of last year.

Grierson is considered the originator of British work on documentary films as they developed in the 1930s.   I would recommend very much the Wikipedia page on Grierson since it gives his academic background and explains his ideas in that context and in his continuing work.   His first work was on the Scottish herring fleet and called 'Drifters'. It had its premiere in1929 along with the first showing  in Britain of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin,.

Neil comments about the work done by the Empire Marketing Board that “the board hadn’t reckoned to be landed with such vigorous talent   and were astonished at the quality of the first production”. They took up Residence at Blackheath Art Club as studios and made dozens of films from then on. The Marketing Board had been wound up and they became the GPO Film Unit.  The man who persuaded the -Post Office to take on the film unit was Steven Tallents. Arguably the world's first multi-media entrepreneur whose remarkably active career included a stretch as Public Relations Controller at the BBC under Reith.

This early strand of the GPO Unit's filmmaking is best represented by its made in Blackheath  'masterpiece', Night Mail (1936),

The travelling Post 0ffice was, of course, a big organisation and here were far more trains which ran every night than the one depicted in the film.  The Post Office employees on the train are sorting letters as the trains travels north and at various point sorted letters are unloaded and other bags taken in to add to those to being sorted.  The service continued until the early 21^st century the last trains running in 2004.  In the 1980s I was at a party in Charlton where there were a group of men who were all employees of the still functioning travelling Post 0ffice and they talked at length about the strange life see led with the shift systems which meant they left London one evening to return two days later. They were clearly very proud of what they did and it was interesting to hear them describing it.

Famously all the sequences showing the sorting teams were filmed in Blackheath. We are always told that cast members were told to sway a bit so it looked as if they were on a moving train.

The postal museum website describes how Night Mail  transformed the routine chores of the postal service into an emotionally charged, highly aesthetic tribute to their work. Critics  today draw attention to the techniques and influence of Eisenstein , and borrowing from Soviet cinema showed the work of the travelling post office as collective labour supported by a strong centralised organisation. It also reflected the ideals of many of the young men who worked in he Blackheath studios  in the 1930s.

I had a look to see what the Americans thought about Night Mail  in the big movie databases, IMBD and Rotten Tomatoes. They both give it only just over 60% of appreciation and there are some very very critical comments in Rotten Tomatoes from people who find it boring and only acceptable because it’s so old.  But also “more impressive than an initial overview of its synopsis may make it appear. The film is awash with potent imagery, “  And to sum it all up  “Iconic glimpse into social history, accompanied by two great figures of 20th century culture, Britten and Auden, and a magnificent train. What have we lost?”.

 

Anyway to get back to me and my reaction to the film I think I remember being told that the engine of a locomotive has this same resonance or frequency, or something. as the human heartbeat. So perhaps that’s why we all respond so emotionally to steam locomotives - but it’s the bit at the end of the fiom which gets me in tears.

Its the start of the final sequence written and composed by a very young W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten  ...there is the  dark of night over the moors, and the first puff of white smoke down at the right hand edge of the screen

 

This is the Night Mail crossing the border

Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,

The shop at the corner and the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb –

The gradient's against her, but she's on time

 

I’d still like to see that new film, though, the one that everyone who sees it is said to be  weeping