Annette Kuhn

CCINTB’s 1990s interview fieldwork in the North West of England took in the cotton textile manufacturing town of Bolton, Lancashire, which boasted more than twenty cinemas in the interwar years and was the location of Mass Observation’s celebrated 1930s ‘Worktown’ studies.^[1] As part of its COVID-delayed engagement programme, Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive put on a public event at the newly refurbished Bolton Little Theatre on the afternoon of Saturday 16 October 2021.

Following a brief introduction by CMDA Co-Investigator Annette Kuhn, two classics of 1930s British cinema–Sing As We Go! and Spare Time–were screened in the Theatre’s main auditorium.

The most famous and fondly recalled of ‘Lancashire Britannia’^[2] Gracie Fields’s films, the 1934 feature Sing as We Go! includes scenes shot in Bolton and in the seaside resort of Blackpool, forty miles away. After losing her job at a Lancashire cotton mill, high-spirited Grace Platt (Fields) has various adventures in Blackpool before returning to the mill when a new business deal enables it to re-open. Scripted by playwright and novelist J.B. Priestley, this fast-moving film is basically a series of sketches linked by songs and romantic complications, set against the all-pervading reality of a factory closure.

Sing as We Go! was preceded by a short film, Humphrey Jennings’s Spare Time. Inspired by Mass Observation and its ‘Worktown’ project, Jennings’s 1939 GPO Film Unit documentary looks at the leisure activities of coal, steel, and cotton communities across Britain, with footage from Sheffield, Manchester, and Pontypridd as well as Bolton: clips of wrestling, ballroom dancing, card games, and pigeon fanciers are edited together in startling combinations to the sounds of brass bands, choirs, and jazz.

In the Little Theatre’s Forge Studio, visitors had time before and after the screening to browse a display of archival materials relating to Bolton and its cinemagoing history, including items from CMDA’s and Live from Worktown’s own collections; enjoy a slide presentation showcasing Bolton’s former cinemas and clips from some of our Bolton interviews; meet CMDA team members; and chat with local experts David Burnham of Live from Worktown and Dick Perkins of Worktown Words, who acted as local liaison, publicising the event, and organising the display.

COVID restrictions meant that the event and the hospitality on offer were more modest in scale than had originally been planned. But the feedback from visitors was very positive; and indeed none of it would have been possible without the support and assistance generously provided over many weeks by David and Dick, by Frances Clemmitt and the Bolton Little Theatre staff and volunteers, and by the Lancaster University students who assisted with hospitality on the day.

An audio walking tour of key cinema sites in Bolton has been created together with an accompanying leaflet to print off or download. Further CMDA public outreach events are being planned to take place in Lancaster and London later in the year.

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^[1] For details of Bolton fieldwork and participants, go to the Bolton home page.
^[2] Jeffrey Richards, ‘Gracie Fields: the Lancashire Britannia (part 1)’. Focus on Film, vol. 33 (1979), 27-35; ‘Gracie Fields: the Lancashire Britannia (part 2)’. Focus on Film, vol.34 (1979), 23-38.

Last Autumn I posted an explanation of how the interviews conducted as part of Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain were planned and managed (‘Annette Kuhn talks about a key aspect of CCINTB’s research design’, 23 October 2020). The other significant element in the project’s memory work with 1930s cinemagoers was a questionnaire survey. The survey was not part of the original plan, but came about as a result of the overwhelming response received to calls for potential interviewees. Hundreds of letters, enquiries, and offers of information poured in from all over Britain, and it became apparent that the project had generated much more interest than could be accommodated through interviews alone. Our funder, the Economic and Social Research Council, agreed to the plan to invite those correspondents who were not selected for interview to take part in a postal questionnaire survey.

The questionnaire was kept short and simple, and designed–through the choice, framing and ordering of questions–to stimulate recall of events and experiences of more than sixty years earlier. Questionnaires were sent out in two batches: 129 in May 1995 and 97 in December 1995. Of these 226 questionnaires, a total of 186 were returned, representing an encouraging response rate of over 82 per cent. Questionnaires were processed using SPSS, a software package widely used in the social sciences for quantitative data analysis.

Three-quarters of the respondents found out about the project through announcements in a local newspaper or a specialist publication for the elderly (Table 1, below). Although no gender balance was planned or intended, respondents divided themselves more or less equally as to gender: of the 186, 91 (49 per cent) were male and 95 (51 per cent) female. Some six in ten were born between 1915 and 1924, the median year of birth being 1922 (Table 2). Nearly one-third of all respondents had lived in the southeast of England during the thirties (Table 3), and the majority lived in larger towns and cities as opposed to small towns and rural areas.

Just over half of the respondents finished their full-time education at the age of fourteen or below: that is, at the minimum school-leaving age for their generation, for whom education beyond elementary school was a minority experience. The women, however, were rather more likely than the men to have received a secondary education. At the end of their full-time education, the largest single group of men and women entered jobs classified as skilled: these included secretarial and clerical occupations (accounting for more than 27 per cent of all respondents) as well as certain types of administrative and craft jobs. A substantial additional group found work in sales occupations, and another group in agriculture and other primary occupations. In general, as might be expected of a self-selected sample, the people taking part in this survey appear to have had slightly more formal education, and to have worked in jobs requiring greater skill and/or more training, than would be expected in their age group as a whole.

The completed questionnaires are in the process of being scanned, and a number are currently viewable on the CMDA website via the home pages of selected CCINTB participants [example – Myra Schneiderman].

For a copy of the questionnaire and a report of the findings of the survey, see Annette Kuhn, ‘Cinemagoing in Britain in the 1930s: report of a questionnaire survey’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 19, no. 4 (1999), pp. 531-543.

Tables:

Table 1 – Mode of Contact

	n	%
Personal contact	13	(7.1)
Local radio	4	(2.2)
Newspaper (e g Manchester Evening News)	75	(41.2)
Specialist press (e g Mature Tymes)	62	(34.1)
Local history/film society	4	(2.2)
Unknown	24	(13.2)

 

Table 2 – Year of Birth

	Male n (%)	Female n (%)	All n (%)
1903-1914	6 (7.0)	10 (10.5)	16  (8.6)
1915-1924	51 (56.0)	59 (62.1)	110 (59.1)
1925-1934	34 (37.0)	26 (27.4)	60 (32.3)

Median y.o.b	1923	1922	1922
Range	1906-32	1903-34	1903-34

 

Table 3 – Region of Domicile in the 1930s

	n (%)
Southwest England	14 (17.5)
Southeast England	61 (32.8)
East Anglia	34 (18.3)
Midlands	12 (6.5)
Yorkshire/Humberside	9 (4.8)
Northwest England	22 (11.8)
North England	5 (2.7)
Scotland	11 (5.9)
Northern Ireland	1 (0.5)
Wales	15 (8.1)
Unknown	2 (1.1)