Annette Kuhn

The last blog, “Terrible waste of a brain”, looked at Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain (CCINTB) interviewees’ memories of their schooldays. Although interviewees were not expressly asked about their schooling, the issue sometimes came up when they talked about their early cinemagoing. It also arose on occasion when they were asked  how old they were when their full-time education came to an end—about their terminal education age, to use the jargon. Along with a few mentions of school trips to the cinema, there are memories of playground gossip with schoolfriends about films they had seen and of swapping film star photos with friends.

More conspicuous in references to schooling, however, is a thread of memory talk that hints at education having been thwarted or curtailed—mentions of missing out on schooling or being prevented by their circumstances (poverty, a father’s absence or joblessness, say) from taking up educational opportunities. In these instances there is usually an underlying class and/or gender dimension. Very often it is the requirement of a school uniform that is recalled as the principal bar to getting into a “good school”, even where a free place was on offer.

Emerging from some of these accounts, though, is a sense of making the best of what was available to them by way of basic schooling. Also noticeable is a theme, apparent in some female participants’ memories, concerning the channelling of their talents and aspirations into other areas of life. What one participant calls the “clothing aspect” is prominent in these stories.

The clothing aspect is, of course, already present in the school uniform topos. In “Terrible Waste of a Brain”, Glasgow interviewee Nancie Miller’s repeated allusions  to schooling and education are touched on. It seems that, although Mrs Miller left school at the earliest possible opportunity, she had not only received some post-elementary education (“I went up to my big school”), but had also, with her mother’s assistance, managed to surmount the challenge posed by the school uniform rule:

I had to get a trench coat.  I had to get a gym tunic, I had to get a white blouse, I had to get a school tie, I had to get a badge, sewn on to the tunic. And we couldn’t afford any of these things. And my mother, I think it would’ve been her own, navy blue set of skirt, opened it up all up, washed it, turned it and made me a tunic, a very nice tunic. So much so, that the teacher asked me where my mother had bought it. She was very clever with her hands. […]. Very clever. It was a lovely tunic and for ages I used it as a skirt. The blouse wasn’t just white, it was kind of creamy and I didn’t like to tell her. The tie should’ve been a silk tie, but the colours were right, but it was a kind of… you’ve maybe seen them in the men’s ties, kind of knitted, silk knitted. […]. Erm I had a velour hat, which we’d to wear, so you see they were so particular, really so particular.^[1]

Another kind of uniform-related challenge is remembered by an interviewee who had worked as an usherette and cashier in cinemas in Glasgow during the 1930s, when it was commonplace for public-facing staff to wear uniform. Sheila McWhinnie recalls that although a uniform was a requirement of the job, she had to meet most of its cost out of her wages:

At seventeen and sixpence was what you got for a wage, you’d to buy your own black dress, and what they supplied for a uniform was collars out of Woolworths, and say for six or seven usherettes, [the cinema manager] would send someone for seven collars let’s say, and you’d put them on your black dress and that was it! ^[2]

It is clear from Mrs McWhinnie’s account—she mentions several times in the course of her interview that she was obliged to foot the bill for most of her uniform—that, like the school uniform rule, this was experienced as an imposition.

This feeling surrounding school and workplace uniforms–as an obstacle or an unwarranted expense–stands in the starkest contrast to the ways in which the “clothing aspect” figures in memories of what was to be seen on the cinema screen.

Quoted in “Terrible waste of a brain” is Manchester interviewee  Ellen Casey’s memory of being impressed by the “marvellous dresses” worn by local celebrity Gracie Fields in Queen of Hearts, a film Mrs Casey remembers seeing on a school trip. When talking about her subsequent cinemagoing, she evokes something of the intensity of feeling that films inspired in her:

That’s when I felt on top of the world because I’d see them beautiful dresses and smart clothes! And I used to be, I really, I was absolutely obsessed with it. […] Even them days, the actresses you know. And you see eh Betty Grable and eh, you know, all that were going them days. And the beautiful, they had [shoulder] pads, they had their pads then you know, they had their padding on. They were tight, you know. And erm Bette Davis, and all these beautiful– Aw that was, to me, it was something to see you know. And eh a really erm tch, oh, how can I say? I was, I was really obsessed with it.^[3]

The obsession this participant evokes is, in a way, its own pleasure. She knew she could enjoy such loveliness at any time–albeit vicariously–simply by going to the pictures. This  feeling clearly goes beyond “beautiful dresses and smart clothes”, though. Such things, as Mrs Casey tells it, clearly stand in for all things “lovely”. She notes that she “would often wonder if, you know, will I be like that, will things get better you know. And you always had visions of being like [people in the films]. You know, seeing them. It was just lovely.” As she speaks, decades on, it is clear that this feeling remains very much alive for her.

I lie in bed now sometimes of a night thinking how thrilled I used to be. And how envious,  when I seen all these lovely things and all that. And I thought, I wonder if I ever, you know. I wonder if I ever will get better and sorted out.^[4]

These statements are expressions of a longing that is deeper and wider than films or cinema or clothes: a wish that all things “will get better”. The  emotional force of these memories  of gazing at the “beautiful dresses and smart clothes” in films carries a yearning, and perhaps  a hope, for life’s imperfections and troubles to be soothed away

*

For other participants, admiration for the beautiful dresses and smart outfits in films could be parlayed into a practical kind of “making do”. Making do is an essentially creative activity, which Michel de Certeau defines as a form of counter-hegemonic production, an art of “using” by “poaching” from the “rationalised, expansionist, centralised, spectacular and clamorous production” with which people are faced.^[5]

Glasgow interviewee Mary McCusker recalls a specific act of film-inspired “making do”, citing her mother’s role in bringing a sartorial dream to life. Recollecting The Dolly Sisters, a 1945 Technicolor film starring June Haver and Betty Grable, she exclaims:

Oh! The clothes in it were oh, lovely. And being young, you know, you’re saying, “Oh!” So, I was growing out of this coat. And eh, my mother thought she’d be very practical. And they [Haver and Grable] had come out in this picture with beautiful pale-blue coats with fur. Grey fur muffs, grey fur hats and a big band of grey fur on the bottom of their coat. So here I had this wine-coloured coat and it had black fur on the collar, black fur on the cuffs. And my mother thought, practically, to get another month or two out of the coat, she would buy black fur and put it on the bottom. And I felt like, whoa! [claps and laughs] Whole cheese, right enough!  Felt good! ^[6]

Mickie Rivers of Needham Market in Suffolk is among the CCINTB interviewees who say they were unable to continue their education because of the cost of a school uniform. Talking about her cinemagoing as a young woman, she echoes Ellen Casey’s and Mary McCusker’s sentiments about “the clothing aspect” and shares their eye for details of dress and fashion. Leafing through a 1930s film annual, Mrs Rivers exclaims, “Oh but look at the gowns they wore. Wonderful full skirts. Aw!” ^[7]

She contrasts the plenty (“full skirts”) of the fashions she saw in films with what was available to her as one of five children. “We had so little”, she says. “And like I said before, I had to be taken away from grammar school because my mum couldn’t afford a replacement uniform.” Watching films, she adds, she would “drool and dream”.

. . . But  then she would turn daydream into action:

I wonder if I could do that to my old dress? I could do that. You’d see them with a dark dress and a different coloured sash. And you’d got about half a yard of taffeta. And spend all night making a sash. And, do a little bit of trimming somewhere else on the dress, to pick it up. You know. That was all inspirational, weren’t it?

Her mother helped, too:

My mum used to go to jumble sales and come home with a dress, outsize dress, and fit me out of it. Had to. Hadn’t got the money. I used to earn, when I first went to work, I earned seven and sixpence. I had to pay my mother seven shillings a week and buy my stockings out of the sixpence. The cheapest stockings you could buy were ninepence a pair. And they were lisle stockings with an artificial silk covering. And of course you got to want a pair of silk stockings. You went up to one and nine, one and elevenpence [for those].

[…] And then when I got a rise and I went up to ten shillings a week, I had to give my mother eight and buy all my clothes. The fact that my mother had seven shillings a week off me meant she’d go to a jumble sale as I say and buy something. I’d bring it home, unpick it, wash it, turn it, if it was turnable, and remake it. Had to, to have anything to wear.

She recalls that later on,

I got about a dozen sets of underwear, ready, for when I got married. But they’d all been made with bits that I’d cadged ’cause I’d worked in the factory of the… I worked in the office of the factory in Ipswich. And I was friends with Bob the storeman. And he used to give me oddments. […]. And I had to do a panel on a pair of French knickers. Or perhaps I’d go to a sale and there’d be a half a yard of what we called Sparva material. And that would make one half of a pair of pants. And you’d go and buy the other half yard at full price and you’d got, you know, things for next to nothing.^[8]

*

Ellen Casey’s, Mary McCusker’s and Mickie Rivers’s memory talk embodies a train of thought prompted by, and leading back to, the idea (or rather the feeling-memory) of earnestly desiring something that is beyond your reach.^[9]

In Mrs Rivers’s account, especially, cinema comes across as rather more accommodating than the education system as far as “the clothing aspect” (and, in this topos, aspiration) was concerned. Her memory talk–the precise recollection of her wage rises, the careful recording of the pre-decimal cost of different sorts of stockings, the specificity in the naming of fabrics—all suggest that aspirations, longings, inspired by films could succumb to a certain amount of ‘making do’; that, drawing on her own skills and creativity, a young woman could create something stylish and desirable by, and for, herself using whatever materials came to hand–jumble sale castoffs, factory remnants, a scrap of taffeta.

The vividly remembered details are extraordinarily telling in terms of the emotional investment in, the craving to grasp, something more perfect, something over and above the mundane, something that transcends the ordinary, the everyday. They are revealing, too, of pleasure and pride in remembering the resourcefulness of channelling one’s skills and creativity into surmounting obstacles: here by fashioning, through ingeniously upcycling what was available, a stylish outfit out of not very much.

Women like Ellen Casey, Mary McCusker and Mickie Rivers would surely concur with Linda Grant’s dictum that “the only thing worse than being skint is looking as if you’re skint.”^[10] “I could do that”, they declare; claiming, perhaps, that this, unlike getting a decent education, was one thing that a smart girl^[11] could manage for herself.

 

---

With the exception of Nancie Miller’s, the interviews quoted from 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.

---

^[1] Nancie Miller, Glasgow, 17 February 1995. NM-92-014AT001. Cinema Memory Archive.

^[2] Sheila McWhinnie, Glasgow, 21 November 1994. SM-92-004AT001. Cinema Memory Archive.

^[3] Ellen Casey, Manchester, 31 May 1995. EC-95-182AT001. Cinema Memory Archive.

^[4] Ellen Casey, Manchester, 31 May 1995. EC-95-182AT001. Cinema Memory Archive.

^[5] Michel de Certeau (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life, trans Stephen Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press): 31; cited in Annette Kuhn (2002). An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London: I.B. Tauris): 123.

^[6] Mary McCusker, Glasgow, 22 November 1994. MM-92-008AT001. Cinema Memory Archive.

^[7] Mickie Rivers, Suffolk, 8 November 1995. MR-95-210AT002. Cinema Memory Archive.

^[8] Mickie Rivers, Suffolk, 8 November 1995. MR-95-210AT002. Cinema Memory Archive.

^[9] On feeling-memory, see Annette Kuhn (2023). Exploring Cinema Memory (Edinburgh: Argyll Publishing): 101-104.

^[10] Linda Grant (2009). The Thoughtful Dresser (London: Virago Press).

^[11] Annette Kuhn (2000). ‘Smart girls: growing up with cinema in the 1930s’. In Ib Bondebjerg (ed.), Moving Images, Culture and the Mind. Luton: University of Luton Press): 31-42.

 

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)

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

---

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.

---

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