Annette Kuhn Looks at 1930s cinemagoers and their schooling

In the course of reflecting on their childhood cinemagoing, Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain (CCINTB) participants would often fall into talking about their schooldays, sometimes recalling playground chit-chat about films seen and stars venerated:

And erm and then we’d talk with girls in the school yard. We used to sit, sit down in the school yard, in a group, talk. They were all as bad as me, you know. All as bad as me. Wanting to know. Who. If I didn’t go [to the pictures] the night before, somebody did. Talked about it all the time. (Ellen Casey)

Or the temptation to bunk off school to go to the pictures:

Interviewer: Yeah. ‘Cause I was interested when you’d been telling me on the phone about eh, all the kids sort of skipping off school—

Interviewee: Oh yes. […] But you see, I didn’t. I wasn’t that gone. [bursts out laughing] I was a good little girl. (Kath Browne)

Or leisure-time trips to the cinema in the company of friends from school:

[Going to the cinema] was usually with my school friends. […] And eh, yes. Ooh, we used to chatter a lot about the films we’d seen at school. We were all collecting film star photographs. (Beatrice Cooper)

As well as the occasional cinema visit organised by their school:

I seen [Gracie Fields] in a few films. You know they took us once from school to see one of her films and it was called Queen of Hearts. I remember that. Well. Taken to the pictures. We loved it. You know. And she had these marvellous dresses on and all this. (Ellen Casey)

Now, of course, the school took us once a year to the pictures. […] Mhm. What did I see in the school pictures? Well, the first one I saw was Little Women. (Nancie Miller)

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All the interviewees were asked how old they were when their full-time education came to an end (for most of their generation the minimum school-leaving age was fourteen). To some participants, this question offered an occasion for comment on the educational opportunities that had been available to them. Their reflections, frequently alluding to constraints on their schooling, are expressed as a distinctive set of themes and modes of telling, and these are typically conveyed in a variant of memory talk that melds the personal with the collective or frames the personal within a collective experience.^[i]

A number of participants recall that their home circumstances simply put them out of contention for anything beyond the most basic schooling. Nat Frieling, for example, never even sat the exam for a scholarship to secondary school:

I left school at thirteen. The answer to that is–such is poverty. I never went in for nowt.

Going on to a secondary school was out of the question, others recall, because for most schoolchildren fees would have to be paid:

We weren’t in the position to go on to, er, [post-elementary] education in those days as they are now. Because in those days, you had to pay for it. […] You had to pay for it in those days. (Sam Flamholtz; left school at fourteen)

I would have loved to have gone on to continue my education, but it wasn’t possible financially. At that time […] you used to pay for everything, well, you know I was an only one and [they] still couldn’t afford to educate me. (Mary McCusker; left school at fourteen)

And a free secondary-school place might not be taken up because a uniform and other necessities still had to be paid for:

You sat an examination and normally you’d go to a high school or something. I got, eh, I was getting free to this convent school. […]. But it would have meant books, and it would have meant uniform and my mother couldn’t see her way to do it. (Sheila McWhinnie; left school at fourteen)

I had to be taken away from grammar school because my mum couldn’t afford a replacement uniform. (Mickie Rivers; left school at fourteen)

For some, staying on at school beyond the minimum leaving age is recalled as having been out of the question because the earnings from a job were an essential addition to the family’s income.

[I left school] the day I was fourteen because, I hadn’t even got my school leaving certificate but being honest, it was a new thing, and I didn’t really care a lot. You know as long as I was sort of helping a bit, but as the babies kept coming…. (Irene Dennerley)

There are some differences in the feeling tone of these memories of education curtailed. Some accounts convey, dispassionately, a sense of acceptance. The situation is recalled  as a taken-for-granted feature of the passage from childhood to adulthood, and certainly nothing to make a fuss about.  Ellen Casey’s essay ‘Out of school and into work’ opens:

December 1934 was the time I left school in Collyhurst. Having reached the age of fourteen, it was time to move on. I already had a job in a Raincoat and Waterproof Factory opposite Strangeways Prison, and I was to start work at 8.30am on 2nd of January 1935.

Bringing home a wage is recollected in quite positive terms: not just as indispensable for the family but as something to be glad about and even proud of:

I was going to be fourteen before the… practically on the day the school returned, I was going to be fourteen. But in my mind, I wasn’t going back, ‘cause we needed the money and I thought no, if I could just get a job. (Nancie Miller)

There surfaces in these recollections little or no resentment about the barriers participants faced. In memory at least, “unrealistic” ambitions were neither harboured nor even brought to consciousness at the time. More commonplace is a sense of acceptance—resignation would be too strong a word–that, though things might be different today, at the time limitations on education and barriers to ambition were simply the rule, the way of the world for people of their generation and their class.

And for their gender, too. If not expressly articulated, the sense that girls faced more limited educational opportunities than boys, or that less was expected of them—perhaps even that education is wasted on a girl–is often implied:

I was at school with a girl, and she was one of five. And she sat next to me and when any problems were put up on the board, eh, she would just take one glance at the board, and the next thing she would sit back with her arms folded as we had to do then to let the teacher know we were finished. And everybody else would be sitting chewing on their pencil. Do you know that that girl went on to work in a wee draper’s shop and sold ribbon and wee bits of lace. Oh! Terrible waste of a brain!  (Mary McCusker)

While memories of schooling and school-leaving are more  frequently offered by female than by male participants, taken together these are too few in number to be regarded as more than indicative of a trend. But while it would certainly be rash to generalise from these cases, the shared themes and structures of feeling across all  CCINTB informants’ memory-talk are telling. These personal memories of truncated schooling and missed opportunities belong to the collective memory of a generation. Many of us will have heard similar stories from our own grandparents.

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There is a fine line, though, between acquiescing to the inevitability of a particular state of affairs and quietly, perhaps unthinkingly, extracting the maximum benefit from what was on offer. Nancie Miller’s interview is full of references to schooling and education: “I enjoyed school, really truly enjoyed it. In fact, I loved it,” she insists. Recalling her first day at in the classroom, she says that she was taken to school at the age of four by her older sister, and that she “sat there quite happy and erm I can remember, the teacher didn’t seem to mind. Nobody minded.” From seeing her sister putting up her hand and answering the teacher’s questions correctly and “beaming as if it was me that had answered”, she “knew the importance of learning.” But this, it seems, was as far as it went for Nancie. Her circumstances were such that she “had no thought of staying on at school.”

Ellen Casey paints her childhood self as unusually resolute in the matter of education. She remembers a determination to make the best of her schooling, recalling that she more or less managed her own education, taking herself to school when she was only three, transcending a  sectarian divide to sample the options available locally, and then deciding on what she considered best for her:

I wandered into school when I was three. And that was a Protestant school because it was just near, and I went in with all the kids. And they never bothered. They just let me go in. So I started going there. […]. But the priest started coming round to see my mother saying that it’s not right to go to the Protestant school. The Catholics, they should be there. You know, you’re doing wrong. Letting them go. So my mother was a bit worried about it. She asked us did we want to go to St Patrick’s Catholic. So I knew some girls up our street went. Said, “Oh yeah! I’ll go. Yeah.” So, we went to St Patrick’s. I was only there I think about 18 month and I hated it. I absolutely hated it. I hated the nuns. They were awful. The nuns were awful. I had to go to the, well they had a convent next to it: And I had to go every night to learn the religion that I’d lost out on. You know what I mean? To pick up on the religion. I didn’t like that. You know. Kids were going to play centres, watching magic lantern, and I was going with the nuns. And I hated it. I was broken-hearted. So eh, I said to my mother, I said, “Oh,” I said, “Mam. Don’t like it.” And I used to cry so. I said, “Give me a note and I’ll go back to the headmaster at St Catherine’s and ask if he’ll have me back.” So my mum said all right. She writ me a note. And I went and I says to him, I said eh, “[…] Can I come back? Please.” I said, “I don’t like it there,” I said, “I do hate it,” I said, “And I don’t want to go and it’s making me ill.” So he read the note off my mother and he eh, “Yes,” he said, “You can come back.” He said, “When you want to come back. Tomorrow or Monday?” I said, “Tomorrow.” So I went back to the Protestant school. So, that was me. I was really, nothing bothered me. I used to do anything. I wasn’t a timid child. I wasn’t, you know. I’d just do any– I had the willpower to do anything.

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Several interviewees evidently felt their lack of education particularly keenly, recalling their efforts to remedy matters in their adult lives through self-education or adult education. Nat Frieling, who explains that he received no secondary education because he had to leave school as early as possible and go out to work, was left with a lifelong thirst for learning:

I was determined, because I left school at thirteen, to attempt […] to educate myself. Most boys of my age went dancing when they were seventeen, eighteen. Which is quite a nice sociable thing to do. I didn’t. Most boys of my age, round about seventeen or twenty, went and played billiards. Most people of my age joined organisations, clubs. And they went to the dogs, racing. Did all kinds of social activities which I didn’t. My main activity was based on one word. Education. I went to every museum and possible place of advancement in Manchester. To do one thing. Only one thing. To learn. 

An active trade unionist, in later life Mr Frieling studied for a diploma in economics through the labour movement. He relished his CCINTB interview, treating it as a further opportunity for self-improvement and addressing the interviewer as a colleague and fellow scholar.

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A different, and quite distinctive, feeling tone marks some other memories of curtailed schooling and out-of-reach opportunities. Unspoken in the recollections of a number of interviewees is a suggestion that their native talents and abilities, unacknowledged or undeveloped through the formal education system, found other outlets for fulfilment of their needs, desires and  aspirations. This observation appears to be confined almost exclusively to women.

The next blog will explore this discovery and consider what it reveals about the meanings of cinema for some women of the 1930s generation.

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Participants

Name	CMA ID	Place and date of interview
Kath Browne	DB-95-38AT001	Bolton, 11 May 1995
Ellen Casey	EC-95-182AT001 EC-95-182PW001	Manchester, 31 May 1995
Beatrice Cooper	BC-95-208AT001	Harrow, 20 July 1995
Irene Dennerley	ID-95-031AT001	Manchester, 1 May 1995
Sam Flamholtz	HR-95-047AT001	Manchester, 27 April 1995
Nat Frieling	NF-95-185AT001	Manchester, 6 June 1995
Mary McCusker	MM-92-008AT001	Glasgow, 22 November 1994
Sheila McWhinnie	SM-92-004AT002	Glasgow, 12 December 1994
Nancie Miller	NM-92-014AT001	Glasgow, 17 February 1995
Mickie Rivers	MR-95-210AT002	Suffolk, 8 November 1995

With the exception of Nancie Miller’s interview, all the above items can be accessed via links on the CMDA website. All Cinema Memory Archive (CMA) items referred to may be consulted in both physical and digital form in the CMA at Lancaster University, by appointment with Special Collections. 

If you wish to cite and/or re-use any of CMA materials, please consult  the CMDA website for information on copyright and using the materials from the collection and for a citation referencing guide.

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^[i] Alessandro Portelli (1981). ‘The peculiarities of oral history’, History Workshop (12): 96-107.