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Humphrey Jennings' Heart of Britain (1941): A reassessment

On 12 November 1940 Humphrey Jennings was safely ensconced in a cosy Cumbrian hotel catching up with his correspondence. His wife Cicely and their two daughters, evacuated to the United States two months earlier, needed reassurance that Jennings had, at least for the moment, escaped the capital. London had been bombed every night since 7 September, but other large cities had yet to suffer extensive damage and loss of life. Even if she was yet to see the final film, Cicely Jennings was well aware of her husband’s front-line role in the making of London Can Take It, a powerful message hastily dispatched across the Atlantic in order to persuade American audiences that this really was the British people’s ‘finest hour’. Along with co-director, Harry Watt, and two of the GPO Film Unit’s most experienced cameramen, Jennings had spent the early weeks of the Blitz capturing on celluloid ‘the unconquerable spirit and courage of the people of London’ [1]. London Can Take It had proved surprisingly successful (helped by the fact that most New York moviegoers assumed the film to be a personal despatch from Quentin Reynolds, the Colliers Weekly correspondent responsible for the commentary) [2]. Jennings had informed Cicely in a previous letter that the film, ‘has done us a great deal of good here: & we are as busy as can be’. Being busy entailed, as we shall see, travelling ‘Round the Midlands & the North which are quiet & warmhearted & practically untouched—believe me!’ [3]. Writing in his Penrith hotel bedroom Jennings insisted that, despite ‘a few exciting nights in the Midlands.... The hills and valleys of the North are as quiet as ever & the pubs & dancehalls are fuller & brighter than before’ [4]. Yet by the time he came to finish the letter circumstances had changed dramatically, and Cicely had fresh cause to be concerned about her husband’s safety: Coventry had experienced the devastating raid of 14–15 November, thereby providing fresh subject matter, fresh inspiration and above all fresh focus, for ‘Backbone of Britain’, a project which up to that point had been terribly worthy but somewhat lacking in direction [5]. The final outcome was Heart of Britain, a pivotal moment in Jennings’ emergence as the poetic genius of British documentary film making [6]. This article focuses upon the making of Heart of Britain, suggesting that most commentators on Jennings’ work have underestimated the film’s significance. Attention is given to the director’s hopes and ambitions by the autumn of 1940, not least the need to consolidate his collaborative approach to documentary film making; and also, most crucially, the need to demonstrate authority, maturity and above all, individuality within the complex creative process of reconciling cinematic vision and propagandist need. Jennings’ artistic engagement with industrial England occurred against a backdrop of the GPO Film Unit’s success in justifying its continued existence (as the Crown Film Unit from the start of 1941), and Jack Beddington’s success in getting both