The Lady Vanishes (1938)

This is the second of a two-part blog looking at the novel The Wheel Spins, and its film adaptation The Lady Vanishes. You can find the first part here.

Following last week’s analysis of the 1936 novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White, this week we consider its film adaptation The Lady Vanishes. The film was released in 1938 and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, who by the late 1930s was directing acclaimed and increasingly high-profile films in England. He would move to Hollywood in 1939. The Lady Vanishes includes a number of stylistic flourishes that make it instantly recognisable as a Hitchcock film.

Although there was only two years between the publication of the novel and the release of the film, and the novel is credited as the source material, there are fairly significant differences between the book and the film. The focus on the female experience, present in the book, is watered down in the film in favour of a more traditional positioning of the female protagonist as assistant to the active, male counterpart. The film’s final section deviates completely from the book, and links much more explicitly to Europe’s political situation in the late 1930s.

As with the novel, the film opens not on a train, but in a hotel in a fictional Eastern European country. The female protagonist, here called Iris Henderson, is on a girls’ trip before travelling back to London to be married. Although Iris and her friends have the hotel staff eating out of their hands, they are presented much more sympathetically than Iris and her friends are in the book. Miss Froy, the lady who vanishes, is also staying at the hotel and she and Iris have some interaction before boarding the train; Iris also meets her eventual love interest, Gilbert, in the hotel.

Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) and Iris (Margaret Lockwood) playing Holmes and Watson in *The Lady Vanishes*

Hitchcock introduced two additional characters, Charters and Caldicott, two men who are determined to get back to England before the end of the Ashes cricket match. This comedy duo proved so popular that they ended up appearing in ten more films, working with a range of directors. To ensure the film does not get too overcrowded, many of the other British characters that appear in the book are not in the film.

Caldicott (Naunton Wayne) and Charters (Basil Radford) in *The Lady Vanishes*

Once the action moves onto the train, the film largely follows the same trajectory as the novel, although Gilbert takes a much more pro-active role in the hunt for Miss Froy and Iris is increasingly relegated to his assistant. This is made explicit in a scene where he poses as Sherlock Holmes with Iris as his Watson. Gilbert even gets to demonstrate his physical daring when climbing out of the carriage window and into the next carriage from the outside of the train.

Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) climbing down the side of the train in *The Lady Vanishes*

Once the pair have located and saved Miss Froy, the action goes in a drastically different direction. The nefarious gang that are trying to kill Miss Froy decouple the two train carriages that contain all the British characters and divert it to a side track into the forest. Once there, the carriages are ambushed by the gang and repeatedly shot at.

It is here that Europe’s political situation has clearly strongly influenced the script. The British characters are debating whether they should get away, fight back, or surrender. One character does not want to fight and instead exits the carriage waving a white handkerchief – he is promptly shot dead by the antagonists. The parallels with Chamberlain’s appeasement approach to Germany could not have been missed by British audiences. Ultimately, with only one bullet left between them, the British passengers manage to get the train running again and are able to get away, but not before Miss Froy has admitted to Iris and Gilbert that she is a spy working for the Foreign Office, and has been given a message for the British government in code. She teaches the code to Gilbert before exiting the train and running into the forest.

This is a significant deviation from the novel, in which Miss Froy is targeted by gangsters because she has unwittingly witnessed something she should not have seen. In the film, Miss Froy is not an innocent bystander who was at the wrong place at the wrong time, but rather part of an international network of spies and informants working for the British state. Rather than being reunited with her family in a celebration of traditional British domestic values, Miss Froy is reunited with Gilbert and Iris as they come off the train. Their triumph is that they have helped the British government gained vital intelligence, with the Foreign Office taking the place of the parental home. In times of political turmoil and with war on the horizon, it is the duty of British citizens not just to help one another, but also to help the State in its mission to suppress international unrest.

The main source of tension in The Wheel Spins, Iris’ concern that she will be locked up in an asylum because no-one believes her, is absent in The Lady Vanishes. Instead, the danger comes not from the British passengers on the train, but from the Europeans who are looking to eliminate a British secret agent. This makes the story much more conventional and in line with many other suspense films of the period. The film is elevated by Hitchcock’s direction and dialogue that balances comedy and drama. The novel and the film stand alongside one another as distinct texts, each using the same plot to foreground different themes.

The Lady Vanishes is available on Youtube.

Ethel Lina White – The Wheel Spins (1936)

This is the first of a two-part blog looking at the novel The Wheel Spins, and its film adaptation The Lady Vanishes.

Ethel Lina White is one of a mass of interwar authors who were quite prolific, had some commercial success during their lifetime, and whose names have been mostly forgotten by the general public. In the case of White, if it were not for the successful adaptation of two of her novels into films, she may have dropped into obscurity altogether. However, her 1933 novel Someone Must Watch was adapted for the screen in 1946 as the American horror film The Spiral Staircase, and her 1936 novel The Wheel Spins was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1938 under the title The Lady Vanishes.

The plot of the book is relatively straightforward: Iris Carr is a young, wealthy, but bored woman who is travelling back to London by train after a holiday in Eastern Europe. On the first stage of the journey there is another British woman in her carriage, a Miss Froy. Iris has suffered sunstroke just before boarding the train and falls asleep. When she wakes up, Miss Froy has disappeared, and everyone else in the train appears to deny she has ever existed at all. Iris gets increasingly frantic trying to prove that Miss Froy exists, and attempts to enlist the help of the various British passengers on the train.

The Wheel Spins is an unusual entry to the suspense and mystery genre, in that the solution to the problem of what happened to Miss Froy is probably quite clear to the reader at an early stage. Instead, the tension of the novel is much more psychological, centring on whether the protagonist, Iris Carr, will be believed or will be dismissed as mentally unstable. That the fear of women being dismissed as crazy, and potentially locked up, has enduring cultural resonance is in evidence in texts such as the 1963 American novel The Group, where a (sane) character is checked into a mental institution by her husband against her will; or the 2018 Stevan Soderbergh film Unsane, in which the female protagonist also appears to be institutionalised against her will. Throughout The Wheel Spins, the other characters, particularly the men, repeatedly tell Iris that she is making things up. The sunstroke she has suffered has given her ‘delirium’ (p. 107); she is ‘loopy’ (p. 207), in a ‘dangerous mental state’ (p. 227) or ‘deranged’ (p. 230). At various points, the conspiracy against her makes Iris believe that perhaps they are right, and Miss Froy never existed; but then she finds a clue left by the other woman which reinforces her resolve.

The bond between these two women, who have never previously met and have very little in common, stands in contrast to the efforts of the passengers on the train to get Iris to give up her search. At the beginning of the book, Iris is part of a ‘crowd’ of ‘vain, selfish and useless’ people (p. 16). She has no interest in others and actively alienates the other British tourists in the hotel; something that comes back to her later when those same tourists are on the train and she appeals for their help. When Iris meets Miss Froy, she quickly finds her company grating: ‘She’s decent, although she is a crashing bore’ is Iris’ verdict on the other woman (p. 77). Yet when Miss Froy disappears, Iris is relentless in her attempts to find her, despite the obstacles in her way. This suggests a connection between women, helping one another out even if their personalities have little in common.

The other theme running throughout the book is that of British people sticking together against foreigners. Time and again, Iris expects other passengers on the train to help her because they are British, even if she has treated them poorly. When Iris first notices Miss Froy is gone, she goes into the dining carriage of the train to ask for help. It is when she explains to two British men that ‘an English lady’ has gone missing, that they feel compelled to help her (p. 100). Two sisters, the Misses Flood-Porters, can be depended on because they are of aristocratic British stock and will therefore always feel obliged to come through in a crisis. A British vicar, despite being sick, also feels it his duty to come to Iris’ aid. The foreigners on the train are variously described as ‘pallid’, ‘callous’ (p. 70), with ‘grinning faces’ (p. 206) that sneer (p. 211). The kidnapping of Miss Froy is part of a political plot in an unspecified Eastern European country, which is described as ‘feudal, and centuries behind us’ (p. 75). The agents of the ruling party do not blanch at the idea of killing someone like Miss Froy, who has accidentally inserted herself into their affairs. The British characters, in contrast, uphold decency and the rule of law.

Throughout The Wheel Spins, the reader is treated to interludes describing Miss Froy’s parents, an elderly couple who live in the British countryside and are eager for their daughter to come home. These scenes have multiple functions: they reassure the reader that Iris is right and Miss Froy is a real person; they raise the emotional stakes of the story as they highlight how devastated the parents would be if Miss Froy were to come to harm; and they reinforce the notion that the orderly, somewhat boring lifestyle of the Froys is aspirational. Iris has no family and no fixed abode; this is presented as giving her a lack of purpose, rather than freedom. The novel ends with Miss Froy safely arriving at her parents’ house at last; ensuring a restoration of the traditional British family.

The Wheel Spins is not a traditional whodunnit, in that the puzzle of what happened to Miss Froy is resolved halfway through the novel, and the details of who was behind her disappearance are left underdeveloped. Instead, it explores themes of alienation and belonging across a range of different registers.

The Wheel Spins has recently been reissued by British Library Publishing. All page numbers given refer to this 2023 paperback edition.

Escape (1926 and 1930)

Although British literature of the interwar period is today perhaps popularly associated with the modernism of Virginia Woolf, during the 1920s and 1930s other, less experimental authors were equally, if not more, well-known. John Galsworthy was one of the authors despised by Woolf as an ‘Edwardian’. His best-known work remain the novels that form the Forsythe Saga, but he was also a prolific playwright and a number of his plays were adapted to film during the 1930s. Galsworthy was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932, mere months before his death.

One of Galsworthy’s last plays was Escape, which was first performed in the West End in 1926. The play transferred to Broadway the following year, where the lead role was performed by Leslie Howard. In 1930, Galsworthy collaborated with director/producer Basil Dean in adapting the story for film for Associated Radio Pictures. The film version starred screen stalwart Gerald du Maurier in the lead role of Captain Matt Denant. The brief period between the play’s premiere and the film’s release, in addition to the high-profile actors attached to both productions, indicates Galsworthy’s fame and popularity during the interwar period.

The story of Escape is somewhat unusual compared to other mainstream interwar outputs. Whereas most cultural productions of the period seek to reinforce the importance of the state in maintaining an orderly society, Escape opens with a direct challenge to authority. Captain Matt Denant, a celebrated war hero, goes for a walk in Hyde Park in the evening. Hyde Park was known as a favourite spot for prostitutes. During the interwar period, the Home Office worked hard on the management of street prostitution in London.[1] Yet the Metropolitan Police’s hard line on soliciting meant they sometimes overstepped the mark, and police officers arrested women who had not been soliciting at all.[2]

Magistrate courts, frustrated with what they perceived to be an influx of cases with insufficient evidence, insisted that in future, it would be a requirement for the man who was being solicited to provide evidence against the accused woman – women would no longer be convicted on the basis of police evidence alone.[3] This complex legal debate is key to understanding the opening of Escape. Once Captain Denant walks through the park, a prostitute comes up to him and solicits. Denant good-naturedly turns down her offer and is about to continue on his way – however, a plain-clothes police inspector has witnessed the interaction. He approaches Denant and asks him to make a statement that the woman was soliciting. In light of the higher evidence bar set by the magistrate courts, this second statement would be a requirement for any conviction. Denant refuses to co-operate and the interaction with the police officer escalates to the point that Denant hits him. The police officer hits his head and dies; Denant gets arrested and convicted for manslaughter.

After this extraordinary opening, Denant is transferred to Dartmoor, one of the most notorious prisons in the country at this time. Rather than accepting his punishment, Denant manages to escape while on work detail, and the remainder of the play/film tracks him as he encounters various people who help him on his flight. Ultimately, a parson is willing to lie to the police, who are hot on Denant’s trail. This gives Denant a moral dilemma and he decides to give himself up to protect the parson.

Not only does Denant refuse to help the police officer in the opening scene to convict a prostitute, he then rejects the punishment he is given for the manslaughter of the officer. Arguably, the prison sentence meted out to him is fair and appropriate, yet Denant does not initially accept it. This indicates he, to a certain extent, places himself above the law. He only ultimately agrees to undertake his prison sentence because he does not want to morally compromise a previously uninvolved third party – not because he necessarily thinks it is appropriate for him to be imprisoned for his actions.

Although Galsworthy was considered an ‘establishment’ writer, the protagonist in Escape rejects the conventional structures of state authority and is willing to go to considerable lengths to avoid any involvement with them. In the opening scene, Denant does not display any of the moral outrage or shock commonly associated with streetwalking in the popular media of the time. Throughout the action, he retains a keen sense of independence and trust in his own judgement: even when he does ultimately agree to sit out his prison sentence, he does so on his own terms.

This is in stark contrast to the majority of plays and films of the interwar period, in which the police in particular are presented as the unchallenged face of authority, which must be obeyed to avoid a breakdown of social norms. In Escape, Galsworthy ostensibly offers up an alternative point of view in which independent judgement rules supreme, even if that does not align with the rule of law. However, Denant’s ultimate acquiescence to the prison sentence, whether arrived at from a sense of moral obligation or not, ensures that in the end of the story social order is restored.

[1] Stefan Slater, ‘Containment: Managing Street Prostitution in London, 1918-1959’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 49, no. 2 (2010), 332-357

[2] Julia Laite, ‘The Association for Moral and Social Hygiene: abolitionism and prostitution law in Britain (1915–1959)’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 17 (2008), 207-223

[3] Stefan Slater, ‘Lady Astor and the Ladies of the Night: The Home Office, the Metropolitan Police and the Politics of the Street Offences Committee, 1927-28’, Law and History Review, Vol. 30, no. 2 (2012), 533-573

Ben Travers

Unlike some of the stars of the interwar silver screen, such as Madeleine Carroll and Ivor Novello, those working behind the scenes can often be a lot less well-remembered. This is certainly true for playwright Ben Travers, whose biggest professional success came during the 1920s and 1930s. He started out in theatre, writing many of the immensely popular Aldwych farces, a cycle of 12 popular plays staged between 1923 and 1933. When some of the farces were adapted for film, Travers also worked on the screenplay adaptations.

Ben Travers was born in 1886 in London. He initially started work in the family business, in the City of London. In Travers’ own words, taken from his autobiography: ‘I was to be sent to the City. Being sent to the City was then the inevitable lot of a youth who didn’t have the aptitude to do any good for himself by being sent anywhere else.’[1] Because the family business had branches all over the empire, Travers ended up travelling widely for his job, spending time in Singapore and Malaysia.

Alongside his day job, Travers was an avid theatre-goer, especially enjoying comedy plays. It was not long before he moved back to Britain, got a job in publishing, and started writing his own plays during the evenings.[2] He was following the advice espoused in the many writing handbooks of the time, and trying to build a writing career in his spare hours. However, commercial success as a writer remained elusive, and at the outbreak of the First World War Travers signed up and served in the Royal Naval Air Service.[3] At the end of the war, his original job was no longer available – Travers took this opportunity to ‘have a go’ at writing.[4] On the advice of those in the theatre industry, he wrote a farce, The Dippers. The text made its way through various theatre contacts and was eventually staged in London in the early 1920s.

The money that The Dippers earned Travers allowed him to keep writing, and he started turning out farces at greater speed. He wrote both A Cuckoo in the Nest and Rookery Nook immediately after The Dippers, and it were these plays that would link him to the Aldwych theatre. A Cuckoo in the Nest was initially considered by acting great Gerald du Maurier, but when this fell through, it was picked up by Tom Walls at the Aldwych. Walls, his co-star Ralph Lynn, and a group of other comic actors, had recently had great commercial successes with the plays Tons of Money and It Pays to Advertise. By 1925, they needed another hit, and opted to perform A Cuckoo in the Nest.[5] In Travers’ words ‘the farce was a definite success’, and it cemented a creative partnership that would last throughout the rest of the interwar period.[6]

The nine plays Travers wrote for the Aldwych company played almost continuously from 1925 through to early 1933. The longest-running play was Rookery Nook, which played 409 performances before it closed; it was followed by Thark which played 401 performances. From the early 1930s, when sound film was introduced in Britain, the company transferred their most popular plays to film. This was partially driven by the restless entrepreneurism of Tom Walls, who increasingly took on a director/manager role in addition to his acting. The first film they made was Rookery Nook. Although it was a commercial success, Travers later claimed that for him it was a ‘painful, distorted version of the genuine article’, as the film medium demanded a completely different approach to gags and timing.[7] Nonetheless, eventually eight out of the nine plays were turned into films, and Travers wrote another 12 film scripts in the 1930s, each of which were produced with some of the original Aldwych farce cast. Contractual obligations and developing personal relationships meant that Ralph Lynn and Tom Walls increasingly appeared separately, although they were often playing opposite other original Aldwych cast members. For example, in 1934 Travers wrote the script for Lady in Dangerstarring Tom Walls and Yvonne Arnaud, the latter of which had played in the stage version of A Cuckoo in the Nest back in 1925.

Travers wrote a few more film scripts in the 1940s and 1950s, and worked in theatre until his death in 1980. The most famous of is later works is the 1975 play The Bed Before Yesterday, which ran for 500 performances in the West End and starred a young Helen Mirren in the original cast. Yet the interwar period represented the undisputed peak of his career. Travers’ farcical comedies, poking fun at the middle classes without threatening to cause any real social disruption, were perfectly suited to a Britain where increasing numbers of white-collar workers had the money and leisure time to be entertained. In the Aldwych farces, he created a brand of humour that both tapped into historical stage traditions and simultaneously spoke to the social and cultural circumstances of the time in which it was made. By being able to transition to popular film at the exact time when the introduction of sound film created a demand for verbal (as opposed to physical) comedy, Travers ensured that his work was captured for posterity.

[1] Ben Travers, A-Sitting on a Gate (London: W.H. Allen, 1978), p. 22

[2] Ibid., pp. 37-39

[3] Ibid., p. 47

[4] Ibid., p. 61

[5] Leslie Smith, ‘Ben Travers and the Aldwych Farces’ , in Modern British Farce, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), pp. 50-69

[6] Travers, A-sitting on a Gate, p. 92

[7] Ibid., p. 110

So-called Schools of Journalism

Journalism boomed during the interwar period – the British were avid newspaper readers: its post-war newspaper consumption per capita was the highest in the world.[1] The increased popularity of newsprint fuelled the demand for more journalists – by 1938 there were an estimated 9000 people working as journalists in Britain.[2] The often glamorous depiction of journalists in novels, autobiographies and (Hollywood) films, plus the fact that there were no formal entry requirements to the profession, made journalism an appealing potential career path.

As has been covered elsewhere in the blog, a formal University Diploma for Journalism launched at the University of London after the First World War. Additionally, there was a flourishing market of self-help books aimed at teaching novices how to become professional writers. The University qualification, however, was not accessible to many people as it was only taught in-person in London and required entrants to have matriculated (i.e. passed a University entry exam). Self-help books required substantial self-discipline on the part of the aspiring journalist. It is no wonder, then, that a third potential route into journalism gained popularity: attendance at a non-accredited ‘School of Journalism.’

There has not been any historical research published on the phenomenon of ‘schools of journalism’, but my own research indicates that they started up immediately after the First World War, and that in a short space of time many different establishments were formed. A single issue of The Strand Magazine, a monthly publication of fiction short stories and non-fiction pieces, contained adverts for the Premier School of Journalism (‘Making Writing Pay.’), the Metropolitan College of Journalism (‘Learn to become a successful writer’) and The Regent Institute (‘Free Lessons for New Writers’). These schools all offered potential clients an easy route into a remunerative writing career. As the advert for the Metropolitan College posed: ‘Why not become a successful journalist or writer of stories and earn a good income at home in spare time?’

Most Schools of Journalism offered a variation of the same: a correspondence course in which students could submit their trial articles, which would then be corrected by tutors and sent back to students with constructive feedback. After a set period of study, students were promised that their writing would be good enough to sell. The advert for the Premier School of Journalism includes (alleged) testimonials of former students quoting significant financial gains from their work: ‘Since taking your class two years ago I have earned £650’ and ‘Since I commenced tuition under you 18 months ago, I have received from my literary work £472.’ For comparison, the minimum weekly pay for a staff journalist in the early 1930s was just shy of £5 – and that was a considerably better wage than journalists had been paid before the National Union of Journalists pushed for national pay agreements.[3]

The aggressive advertising of these journalism schools caused considerable anxiety and disgruntlement for members of the NUJ, who were either worried that these schools would lead to a surplus of journalists and therefore a competitive job market; or felt that these schools were scams designed to make money off unsuspecting people. One of the first schools to launch after the First World War was The London School of Journalism (which still operates today). It was founded by novelist Max Pemberton and it ran a prominent advertising campaign in the national press. In August 1920, NUJ member and journalist John Ramage Jarvie argued that this advertising campaign must have cost the School a significant amount; and that as the fees they charged students were modest, the School’s operating model must rely on recruiting a high volume of students in order to make a profit. Jarvie therefore considered it inevitable that businesses like the LSJ would increase unemployment amongst journalists by flooding the market.[4]

The NUJ initially did not pick up on its members’ concerns about the LSJ and similar ventures, and gave Max Pemberton a platform to advertise his school to NUJ members. Pemberton stated in an article for the Union monthly newsletter that his school actually told many potential students that journalism was not the right career for them. He presented his initiative as a sort of gatekeeper for the profession, and argued (rather disingenuously) that the School’s adverts did not explicitly promise to turn students into journalists.[5]

Pemberton’s arguments failed to convince the NUJ membership, and the Union’s executive swiftly decided that they would only provide advertising space to training initiatives aimed at current, working journalists. Nevertheless, the schools continued to do business throughout the interwar period. Journalist Harold Herd described how he set up his own school in the late 1910s, which was still trading by the time he wrote his memoir in 1936. Like Pemberton, he argued that he only took on students who had a chance of making it as a professional journalist: ‘Every year we reject hundreds of people on the ground that they do not reveal sufficient promise to justify a recommendation to enrol.’[6]

Despite the protestations of school founders, the sheer volume of such organisations; their modest tuition fees; and the simplicity of their teaching materials (one correspondence course mainly encouraged students to learn from, and copy, existing writers’ work) suggest that it is unlikely that many of their students found professional success. Despite there being no formal entry requirements to becoming a journalist, these unregulated schools sold a dream of easy earnings which could not become a reality for most of their pupils.

[1] Adrian Bingham, ‘‘It Would be Better for the Newspapers to Call a Spade a Spade’: the British Press and Child Sexual Abuse, c. 1918–90’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 88 (2019), 91

[2] Political and Economic Planning, Report on the British Press (London: PEP, 1938), p. 13

[3] A.M. Carr-Saunders and P.A. Wilson, The Professions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), p. 268

[4] J.R. Jarvie, ‘The London School of Journalism LTD’, The Journalist, August 1920, p. 68

[5] Max Pemberton, ‘The London School of Journalism LTD’, The Journalist, October 1920, p. 90

[6] Harold Herd, Press Days and Other Days (London: Fleet Publications, 1936), p. 124

The British Union of Fascists and material culture

This post is one of a loose series of explorations of the cultural impact of the British Union of Fascists. You can find other parts of the series here and here.

Although the British Union of Fascists (BUF) was a political party, numerous scholars have argued that it represented a social community as much as a political movement.[1] The BUF set itself apart from other political parties by its leadership cult around Oswald Mosley; mass production of branded memorabilia; and foregrounding of physical fitness as a key tenet of BUF membership. For many BUF supporters, the social and cultural aspects of membership were likely just as important as the political facets.

As the charismatic leader of the party, Mosley encouraged a leadership cult which centred on his image. The party distributed portraits of Mosley to the membership in a variety of formats, from framed pictures to postcards to, even, oil paintings.[2] Postcards, in particular, were a cheap way of mass-producing and mass-distributing an image. At party rallies, careful staging and lighting served to present Mosley in the best possible light, both literally and figuratively.[3]

Beyond photographs, BUF members could indicate their support for the party through the purchase of an array of consumables, including ‘cufflinks, bracelets, earrings, signet rings and brooches.’[4] These accessories were particularly useful after the wearing of the Blackshirt uniform was banned by law under the 1937 Public Order Act. Through the adoption of other signifiers as part of their dress, members could still signal their loyalty to the party to one another and to the public at large. The BUF had adopted a striking, simple logo of a jagged arrow pointing down through a circle. Modern, mass-produced memorabilia sporting the same logo can still be purchased from online auction houses today, demonstrating the lasting impact of the BUF’s visual identity.

Richard Hornsey has recently argued that the interwar period saw a proliferation of ‘brand mascots’ – fictional personifications of popular brands, such as the Michelin man and the ‘Nippy’ waitress.[5] Mosley’s centrality to the BUF brand arguably subverted the increasingly common use of fictional brand personification and replaced it with true personification. Mosley’s physical fitness was key to this construct; he was regularly pictured in sporting outfits and sports were central to the BUF’s activities.[6] At a rally in White City in 1934, during the peak of the BUF’s popularity and fame, Mosley’s speech was preceded by three hours of sports demonstrations: ‘physical training displays, inter-area athletics, boxing matches and fencing.’[7]

BUF members were not only expected to enjoy watching sports, but also to participate in it: the membership bulletin described the day of a typical member to include a couple of hours of ‘boxing, fencing, jiu-jitsu, and first aid.’[8] Such activities were to be undertaken in strictly sex-segregated environments, like most of the BUF’s ventures. This segregation extended to physical altercations with political opponents: there was an expectation that male BUF members would ‘handle’ male opponents, and female members would do the same for female opponents.[9] It was acknowledged internally within the party that physical fitness was pursued not just to increase discipline and mental fitness, but also in order to act offensively against detractors and opponents.

There was a wider interest in physical fitness during the interwar period, for example through the non-political Women’s League of Health and Beauty which boasted up to 170,000 members.[10] The BUF were able to tap into this general interest in physical fitness and ‘drill’ and subvert it for political ends, in the same way that they were able to use mass production and consumption to distribute branded items to a wide range of people. In this way, the BUF went much further than traditional political parties in disseminating its ideology, enabling it to filter through any aspect of a member’s life including their dress; home decoration; and leisure activities. The strong social aspects of BUF membership meant that party members were able to tap into a community, which in turn bound them closer to the party and made it harder to leave, as the party impacted on many parts of their lives.

[1] Michael A. Spurr, ‘’Living the Blackshirt Life’: Culture, Community and the British Union of Fascists, 1932-1940’, Contemporary European History, Vol. 12, No. 3 (2003), 305-322

[2] Julie Gottlieb, ‘The Marketing of Megalomania: Celebrity, Consumption and the Development of Political Technology in the British Union of Fascists’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 41, No. 1 (2006), 42-43

[3] Ibid., 45

[4] Spurr, ‘Living the Blackshirt Life’, 318

[5] Richard Hornsey, ‘“The Penguins Are Coming”: Brand Mascots and Utopian Mass Consumption in Interwar Britain’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 57 (2018): 812–839

[6] Gottlieb, ‘The Marketing of Megalomania’, 43

[7] Julie Gottlieb, ‘Body Fascism in Britain: Building the Blackshirt in the Inter-War Period’, Contemporary European History, vol. 20, no. 2 (2011), 124

[8] Ibid., 121

[9] Ibid., 117

[10] Ibid., 115

Service for Ladies (1932)

Sir Alexander Korda was one of the most prominent film producers in Britain in the 1930s. Together with his brothers Zoltan and Vincent, who both also worked in the industry, Alexander permanently changed the British film industry. The brothers were born in Hungary in the final years of the 19^th century, and Alexander Korda started his film career in that country immediately after the end of the First World War. He then worked as a film producer and director in Germany and Austria in the 1920s, as well as directing some films in Hollywood as the industry transitioned to sound film. From 1930 onwards, Korda was based in London, and he directed his first British feature in 1932. Service for Ladies, or Reserved for Ladies as the film was also known, came a year before Korda’s monster hit The Private Life of Henry VIII. The success of the latter has somewhat overshadowed the earlier film, although it is increasingly shown and discussed again.Service for Ladies is based on a book by Hungarian writer Ernest Vajda, which had previously been translated to the screen in a 1927 silent film also called Service for Ladies, and starring Hollywood legend Adolphe Menjou in the main role. The New York Times noted upon its release that this film’s success largely depended on ‘Mr. Menjou’s ability to hold attention with his role.’ There was some nervousness, then, when Korda decided to cast Leslie Howard as Menjou’s replacement in the sound film. Howard’s father was also Hungarian-Jewish, which gave him a connection with Korda. Howard, however, specialised in playing ‘perfect English gentlemen’, and the role in Service for Ladies required him to convincingly play a head waiter in a London restaurant. Howard and Korda duly conducted field research in London’s real hotel restaurants before shooting.Service for Ladies is a light, romantic comedy centring on the tried-and-tested trope of identity mix-ups, in this case with a side-serving of class anxieties. As Max Tracey, Howard is the exceptional head waiter in a high-end London hotel; he ensures dinners are delivered to perfection, and regular guests depend on his advice. With some of the married female guests, such as the Countess Ricardi (played by Benita Hume), Max’s attentive service covers rather more than just the dinner service. Despite his excellent reputation, Max never forgets the inferior social position he holds in relation to the hotel guests.When he sees the daughter of a wealthy South-African businessman, Sylvia Robertson, who is staying in the hotel, Max falls head over heels in love. The first few times he interacts with Sylvia, it is outside the hotel and she does not know Max is a waiter. He hides the truth from her, and joins her and her father on a skiing trip to the Alps. Once at the hotel, the king of an unidentified European nation also visits on holiday, supposedly ‘incognito.’ Max is on friendly terms with the king because the latter frequently visits the hotel in which Max works. Max’s previous caginess about his identity and source of wealth, coupled with his apparently intimate relationship with the king, make everyone in the hotel (including Sylvia) assume Max is the heir to the throne and the king is objecting to a potential match with Sylvia.

Sylvia (Elizabeth Allan), Max (Leslie Howard), and a gigantic snowman in *Service for Ladies*

At this point, misunderstandings between the couple pile up. Sylvia gets engaged to another suitor to spite Max and forces Max to arrange her engagement party in his hotel. Eventually, after intervention by the king and Sylvia’s father, all complications are resolved, and the happy couple are reunited.

The scenes in the London hotel restaurant, towards the start of the film, give the viewer a sense of the energy, tact and precision required by real-life waiters to ensure all high-profile, demanding guests had all their needs fulfilled. Hotels were about being seen as much as they were places to stay, and the film shows guests asking Max for the latest gossip on their fellow diners, which he discreetly provides. Yet at the heart of the film is the perceived lower status of hospitality work. Despite Max’s role as head waiter, the fact that he works in service is a great source of embarrassment to him, even towards Sylvia whose family is ‘new money’ and not aristocratic.

Once the action moves to the Alps, audiences are treated to some lovely vintage knitwear and a brief appearance of a young Merle Oberon (who would go on to marry Alexander Korda towards the end of the decade). Whilst all the young people in the hotel, including Sylvia, go out for skiing trips every day, Max constantly excuses himself; his different upbringing means he has not learnt to ski like the others have. As a guest in the hotel, Max becomes the subject of gossip, rather than being in control of it like he is when he is at work. Like the guests in the London hotel, the people in the ski resort favour wild assumptions about Max’s background over more pedestrian explanations.

Service for Ladies is a comedy that has withstood the test of time, and is still funny and watchable today – not a negligible feat given the quality of some British films of the 1930s. Although its premise is fantastic and its ending like that of a fairy-tale, at its core the film does reflect the class anxieties that existed in 1930s Britain. By casting the man, rather than the woman, as the potential ‘social climber’, Service for Ladies gives a different perspective than most interwar texts.

Madeleine Carroll

Madeleine Carroll is known as the original ‘Hitchcock blonde.’ She blazed a trail for British female actors into Hollywood, where she had a successful career from the mid-1930s. Prior to her move, though, she made over twenty films in Britain. Carroll starred in some major titles opposite the likes of Brian Aherne, Miles Mander, and Ivor Novello. She was one of the most popular British film stars of the period.[1] This film success led to her being the world’s highest-paid actress by the end of the 1930s.

Unlike most other major stars of the period, and indeed, unlike most of the British population at the time, Madeleine Carroll attended university and obtained a bachelor’s degree in French from the University of Birmingham in 1926. Her mother was French, and after completing her degree Madeleine worked as a French teacher in Hove, on the English south coast. A career in school teaching was an extremely common route for women graduates in the interwar period.[2] However, during her time in Birmingham, Carroll had also engaged in the university’s drama club.

Shortly after graduating, she gave up the teaching job and pursued an acting career, starting off in a touring company and landing a first film role shortly thereafter. Her first proper leading role in a film was in the 1928 feature The First Born, directed by Miles Mander who also played the male lead. Carroll was cast as the female lead, playing wife to Mander’s character Sir Hugo Boycott. The script was co-written by Alma Reville, Alfred Hitchcock’s wife.

The First Born is a melodrama that provided a meaty role for Carroll. It is a marital drama about betrayal, illegitimate children, and deception. It opened the doors for other leading roles, such as in the 1929 film Atlantic. This was one of the earliest film adaptations of the Titanic disaster, and released as a very early sound film with French and German versions released simultaneously. It includes a particularly haunting scene at the very end of the film, when the audience can hear (but not see) the drowning of the hundreds of second- and third-class passengers who did not make it into the lifeboats.

After these two heavy, dramatic roles, Carroll starred in a Victor Saville-directed spy film, The W Plan, in which Brian Aherne played the lead. She followed this up with a supporting role in the Basil Dean-directed moral drama Escape!, a part in the Maurice Elvey-directed comedy School for Scandal and the female lead part in the drama The Kissing Cup Race, directed by Castleton Knight. As is clear from this list, Carroll was in constant demand during the late 1920s and early 1930s, and she was able to work with some of the biggest British directors of the period and work in a range of film genres.

She worked with Miles Mander again in 1931’s Fascination, this time playing the ‘other woman’ who tries to break up a happy couple. In 1933, she made another war film with Victor Saville, I Was a Spy, in which she played a nurse at the front who finds herself emotionally compromised whilst passing information back to the British authorities. Her co-star was Conrad Veidt, one of the biggest stars in British and German cinema of the time. In 1935 Saville directed her again, this time in the costume drama The Dictator. Set in 18^th-century Denmark, Carroll plays Queen Caroline Mathilde, with Emlyn Williams starring as her husband, the King. It dealt with the real-life scandal of an affair between the Queen and the royal doctor, a story which was given an outing on the big screen as recently as 2012.

After The Dictator, Carroll made the film for which she is probably still most famous, and the one that launched her into international stardom: The 39 Steps, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Playing opposite Robert Donat as Hannay, Carroll stars as Pamela. Hannay is the classic Hitchcock hero – a man falsely accused who must simultaneously go on the run and try to clear his name. He meets Pamela on the train up to Scotland as he is fleeing London, and immediately coerces her into helping him. Although initially unwilling, Pamela eventually believes Hannay’s claims to innocence.

Although her part in The 39 Steps is the one for which Carroll is most likely to be remembered, she was already a fully established film star when she made the film. It was Donat who was the less experienced, with only 5 film credits to his name prior to The 39 Steps. The film was well-received upon its release and also marked the start of a first career peak for Hitchcock, who went on to direct The Lady Vanishes and Rebecca in the following few years.

After The 39 Steps, Carroll moved to Hollywood and worked for Paramount studios. She continued to make films at the same rate, starring in 10 films before the outbreak of the Second World War – the last of which, My Son, My Son! again saw her star opposite Brian Aherne. During the war she used her language skills to facilitate between the US Army and the French Resistance. After her sister was killed in the London Blitz, Carroll stopped acting and worked as a war nurse in Italy during the later stages of the war. After the war, she only returned to the screen a handful of times, after which Madeleine Carroll opted for an early retirement and spent most of her time with her family in the south of Europe.

[1] Jeffrey Richards (ed.), The Unknown 1930s: An alternative history of the British cinema, 1929-1939 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998), p. 18

[2] Mo Moulton, The Mutual Appreciation Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford circle remade the world for women (London: Corsair, 2020), p. 70

Tennis in interwar Britain

Early summer is upon us and that means, in London, that the Championships of the All English Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, aka. Wimbledon, is in full swing. The tournament was founded in 1877 and was as significant and popular a sporting event in the interwar period as it is today. As this newsreel footage from the 1928 Men Singles Final (won by René Lacoste) shows, although the players wore shirts and long trousers, the quality and pace of the game were well-developed.

Tennis originated as a lawn sport played at country houses by the upper classes. By the interwar period, however, the game had popularised and, to a certain extent, democratised.[i] Although it never reached the mass appeal of football, public tennis courts became increasingly available and numbered around 800 in London at the start of the 1930s. Suburban tennis clubs also facilitated access to the sport.[ii] And, unlike other sports, tennis was equally accessible for women as it was for men. The spectator crowd at Wimbledon in the footage embedded above is mixed. Female professional tennis players of the period, such as the French Suzanne Lenglen and the American Helen Wills, attained great fame. At the amateur level, tennis clubs were considered appropriate spaces for middle-class men and women to mix and potentially find a life partner.[iii]

The 1924 instructional film ‘Tennis: The Most Democratic of Games for Both Sexes’ foregrounds the equal access women and men had to the game in its title. The twelve minute silent film opens with an intertitle warning the viewer that ‘If you really wish to play tennis, Don’t aimlessly knock a ball about for practice – Get taught early – Faults – like trouble – come easily.’ This insistence on hands-on teaching seems to rather undermine the purpose of the film! The opening shot is of a family group in a garden setting, with one of the women removing frames from tennis rackets and handing them out to various children. All are dressed in light-coloured clothing and mostly in short sleeves, implying that it is a summer’s day. The children then move to a tennis court elsewhere in the garden, where they demonstrate some basic techniques.

The film then introduces two professional (male) tennis players, Charles Read and Charles Hierons. In the next, most substantial, segment of the film, Read and Hierons demonstrate various tennis techniques. Here the film makes liberal use of slow-motion to allow the viewer to understand the players’ movements. Slow-motion was not often used in films of this period (in fact, comedy films tended to speed up action rather than slow it down) but its use here is seamless and sensible. The demonstration shots are interspersed with intertitles providing more explanation. Read and Hierons appear to be playing on an inner-city court, perhaps one of the public tennis courts so recently introduced in London at this time.

After this extensive segment, some shots of Helen Wills in action at a championship are included, presumably to demonstrate the ‘democratic’ nature of the sport. The film ends with a segment of a young girl, identified as ‘Betty’, playing against an unseen opponent in a private court. The focus is on her ‘beautiful footwork’, with some of the shots focusing only on her legs below the knees. This adds an odd tone of potential titillation to this supposedly instructional film, further problematised by Betty’s young age.

Throughout the interwar period, professional tennis continued to receive regular attention in newsreels, even if Britain’s successes on the international tennis stage were limited.[iv] Despite the sport’s democratisation, it continued to be endorsed by the upper classes too, culminating in the Duke of York (later King George VI) playing in the men’s doubles at the 1926 Wimbledon tournament. Although the Duke was of course not a professional player, he was able to enter because his doubles partner, Wing Commander Sir Louis Greig, qualified for Wimbledon because he was the RAF tennis champion. The couple was soundly defeated in the first round: 6-1, 6-3, 6-2.

[i] Joyce Kay, ‘Grass Roots: the Development of Tennis in Britain, 1918-1978’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 29, issue 18 (2012), p. 2534

[ii] John H. Goldthorpe, ‘Class and status in interwar England: Current issues in the light of a historical case’, The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 72, no. 2 (2021), p. 246

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Robert J. Lake and Simon J. Eaves, ‘Defeat, Decline and Disconnect: A Critical Analysis of Attempted Reform in British Tennis during the Inter-war Period’, Sport in History, vol. 37, issue 1 (2017)

Interwar London

Popular Culture in 1920s and 1930s Britain