Women and Children at War DVD, 1940s

Women and Children at War collects eight wartime films that look primarily at the great material and geographical changes brought to the populace of the country by war... more >

Women and Children at War collects eight wartime films that look primarily at the great material and geographical changes brought to the populace of the country by war. Living with Strangers, Our School, Westward Ho! and The Countrywomen deal directly with the problems caused by the evacuation of large numbers of children and their mothers to the countryside, away from the danger of the towns. Children must settle in news schools and adapt to the silence and different rhythm of the countryside, while their mothers have to learn to share someone else’s home. Obviously when Westward Ho! was made in 1940, not everyone was convinced of the need to move as it ends on a campaigning note: ‘Controlled evacuation, planned and executed in good time, IS RIGHT’.

The films are also a fascinating archive for showing what has changed – and what has stayed the same – in educational policy. Our School is concentrated on a rural school, Bampton senior school in Devon. It prides itself on being ‘a new kind of school’, where children learn how to apply their learning to their local environment. This involves them in practical work (‘we don’t use books much’ says the headmaster) – pruning trees, digging and liming the school plot as well as finding out how to tell if a hen will be a good layer. Health and safety would put the mockers on most of this these days of course, and it is an interesting look at a time when the needs of the local district could dictate an approach to a school curriculum.

The wartime concerns also chime well with contemporary concerns regarding the need for healthy eating. The girls ‘don’t just learn cooking, but why things are worth cooking and how to get the best health values from every food’. As the narrator speaks a boy walks in with an armful of vegetables from the school plot. It seems that every generation is fated to learn the very same lessons.

A related film, Bampton shows the way, made by the Realist Film Unit for the Ministry of Food in the same village, continues the theme, as the community organises a food week, again centred around activities in the school. Food ‘neglected in peacetime’ is rediscovered out of necessity in war as children put together wartime recipe books. It’s fascinating too to see the placards that the schoolchildren make for their procession. ‘Raw Greens are good for you’, ‘Waste is choosing the wrong food’, ‘Cook Potatoes in their skins’ and ‘The Earth is yours – make the best use of it’. There’s little chance that these are still around over six decades on, but if they are they could be pulled out again today for much the same purpose.

Of the other films in the collection, Land Girls praises the massively useful contribution they made to the farming life of the nation. Not everyone is convinced though and the film sees a dogged and persistently reasonable land girl confronted with a cussedly stubborn Scottish farmer. Miss Grant goes to the Door is an information film on what to do in the case of invasion. In this case, spinsters confront a German parachutist. The lesson is that ‘the front line is in every home’. Finally, Workers’ Week-End, made by the Crown Film Unit as a tribute to the workers of the British Arcraft Industry, sees a gang of workers attempt – and succeed – in assembling a bomber in the record time of just 30 hours, much less in fact.
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