Commemorating the Great War on Film: Veterans, Pilgrimages and Amateur Filmmaking

Abstract

This article explores the work of four amateur filmmakers from the Canterbury area, between the late 1920s and early 1970s focusing on the films relating to the battlefield visits of First World War veterans and their families. It argues that film provides a fascinating insight into veteran behaviour and culture. Of particular interest is the manner in which the films reveal the continuities and developments in the behaviour of ex-servicemen. The films of the late 1920s and 1930s reveal a highly masculine culture which remained closely aligned with military ceremonial and codes of conduct, whereas the later, post-1945, films show the veterans with wives and family members engaging in a wider range of activities. The article also sets the films within the culture of amateur filmmaking of the time discussing equipment, techniques and exhibition, thus engaging with an element of film history which remains under-explored compared with the degree of research commercial cinema has attracted. The article is supplemented by a short film providing excerpts from all films discussed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Screen Archive South East, the Tony Blake Archive of Kent Film, and the family, friends and donors of films and materials relating to L. Goulden, G. Gisby, G. Page and G. Wright.

Notes

1 Alison Fell, Women as Veterans in Britain and France after the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory. Armistice Day 1919–1946 (Oxford: Berg, 1994); Jessica Meyer, Men of War: masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Eleanor K. O’Keeffe, ‘The Great War and “Military Memory”.’ Journalism Studies 17, no. 4 (2016): 432–47; Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon and London, 2005).

2 See J. M. Winter, ‘Shell-Shock and the Cultural History of the Great War’, Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 1 (2000): 7–11. See appendix for full details of films discussed.

3 See Ian Reader and Tony Walter (eds.), Pilgrimage in Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993); Peter Jan Margry (ed.), Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World. New Itineraries into the Sacred (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008); John Eade and Mario Karić (eds.), Military Pilgrimage and Battlefield Tourism: Commemorating the Dead (London: Routledge, 2017).

4 Justin Wolff, ‘Alexander Forbes and the Aesthetics of Amateur Film’ in Amateur Movie Making: Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915–1960, ed. Martha J. McNamara, Karan Sheldon, Alice T. Friedman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 79.

5 Tim Jones Canterbury Cine Society 2016, https://vimeo.com/195683963

6 Kentish Gazette and Canterbury Press, 22 September 1934, 6 October 1934, 20 October 1934, 3 November 1934 and 22 December 1934.

7 Kentish Gazette and Canterbury Press, 5 May 1934.

8 Kentish Gazette and Canterbury Press, 12 May 1934 and 7 July 1934.

9 The Kentish Gazette and Canterbury Press, 9 May 1936.

10 Home Movies and Home Talkies, Vol. 2, No. 4. September 1933, 142.

11 Amateur Cine World, 19 January 1967, Vol. 13, No. 3, 68.

12 Amateur Cine World, December 1960, Vol. 24, No. 7 advert inserted between 664 and 665.

13 Tim Jones Peter Watkins and the Playcraft Film Unit 2017 https://vimeo.com/403970830; Joseph Gomez, Peter Watkins (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1979), 17–30, 57.

14 Tim Jones, A Youthful Obsession (excerpt) 2023, https://vimeo.com/799169296/641ce585c9.

15 Tim Jones, A Secondary Hobby 2018, https://vimeo.com/267082879.

16 Jackie Evans, email to Tim Jones, 16 February 2023.

17 Jackie Evans, Whatsapp message to author, 18 August 2022.

18 See Maija Howe, ‘The Photographic Hangover: Reconsidering the Aesthetics of the Postwar 8mm Home Movie’ in Amateur Filmmaking – The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web, ed. Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young, and Barry Monahan (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 39–46.

19 Tim Jones Field of View Test 2023, https://vimeo.com/800147853/25c548528b.

20 Amateur Cine World, Vol. IV, No.1, April 1937, 75.

21 Home Movies & Home Talkies, Vol 2, No. 4, September 1933, 136. For further details about intertitles in amateur filmmaking see Home Movies & Home Talkies, Vol. 2, No. 6, November 1933, 228; Harold B. Abbott, Cine Titling Simplified (London: Link House Publications Ltd, 1937).

22 Kentish Gazette and Canterbury Press, 13 April 1935, 26 May 1934.

23 Amateur Cine World, Vol. 24, No. 7, December 1960, 665–6, 694.

24 Home Movies and Home Talkies, Vol. 1, No. 1, June 1932, 12.

25 Ian Gazeley, “Manual Work and Pay, 1900–70,” in Work and Pay in 20^th Century Britain, ed. Nicholas Crafts, Ian Gazeley, and Andrew Newell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 68.

26 Amateur Cine World, Vol. 1, No. 1, 26 January 1961, p. 5 and Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 4, No.1, January 1961 in the ‘Choosing a Projector Amateur Movie Maker Supplement’, iii.

27 Ian Gazeley, “Manual Work and Pay, 1900–70,” in Work and Pay in 20th Century Britain, ed. Nicholas Crafts, Ian Gazeley and Andrew Newell (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 69.

28 Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 3, No. 3, March 1960, 710–11.

29 Page made seven films, Gisby three, Goulden and Wright one apiece.

30 See, for example, The Times, 8 June 1917. For a study of the symbolic significance of Ypres see Mark Connelly and Stefan Goebel, Great Battles: Ypres (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

31 For a fuller study of battlefield tourism see Mark Connelly, Postcards from the Western Front: pilgrims, veterans and tourists after the Great War (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).

32 For examples, see the Illustrated London News, 5 December Graphic, 28 November, 5, 12 December; Sphere, 21 November; Westminster Gazette, 7 December 1914.

33 For a cultural history of attitudes towards ruins see Christopher Woodward, In Ruins (London: Chatto & Windus, 2001), See in particular Chapter Ten, ‘Dust in the Air Suspended’, 205–26, which focuses on the impact of the Second World War.

34 Dominiek Dendooven (translated by Ian Connerty), Ypres as Holy Ground. Menin Gate and the Last Post (Koksijde: De Klaproos, 2001).

35 For a history of the cemetery’s development see Franky Bostyn, Kristof Blieck, Freddy Declerck, Frans Descamps, Jan van der Fraenen, Passchendaele 1917. The Story of the Fallen and Tyne Cot Cemetery (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2007).

36 For a fuller exploration of this idea see Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon and London, 2005), 187–220.

37 Letters and papers relating to Leslie Goulden shared with the authors by Goulden’s family.

38 See Tresham Lever, Clayton of Toc H (London: John Murray, 1971) and Linda Mary Parker, ‘Shellshocked Prophets: the Influence of Former Anglican Army Chaplains on the Church of England and British Society in the Inter-War Years’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 2013).

39 See press coverage in the Citizen, 21 June 1935; Leeds Mercury, 21 June 1935; Illustrated London News, 29 June 1935.

40 Niall Barr, The Lion and the Poppy: British Veterans, Politics and Society, 1921–1939 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 168–74.

41 Koenraad Du Pont, ‘Nature and Functions of Humor Trench Newspapers (1914–1918) in Humor, Entertainment, and Popular Culture during World War I, ed. Clémentine Tholas-Disset and Karen A. Ritzenhoff (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015), 107–21; Michael Hammond, ‘“So Essentially Human”: The appeal of Charles Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms in Britain, 1918’, Early Popular Visual Culture 8, no. 3 (2010): 297–313; Elodie A. Roy, ‘Worn Groves: Affective Connectivity, Mobility and Recorded Sound in the First World War’, Media History 24, no. 1 (2018): 26–45; Graham Seal, The Soldier’s Press. Trench Journals in the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013).

42 See Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory. Armistice Day 1919–1946 (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 61–77.

43 Charles Carrington, Soldier from the Wars Returning (London: Hutchinson, 1965), 258.

44 Whitstable Times, 3 October 1959.

45 See Janet Carsten (ed.), Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

46 W. V. Dawkings, Honorary Secretary, letter to Whitstable Times, 24, 31 October 1959, 5 November 1960.

47 Whitstable Times, 28 May 1960; 10 June 1961.

48 Whitstable Times, 27 August 1960.

49 Whitstable Times, 21 May 1960.

50 Whitstable Times, 27 May 1961.

51 An extract from the programme can be viewed at: 1961: WW1 Veterans return to Ypres | Tonight | BBC Archive - YouTube.

52 Whitstable Times, 1 July 1961.

53 Whitstable Times, 1 October 1960.

54 For a study of West German First World War veterans see Mark Connelly and Stefan Goebel, ‘‘Forgetting the Great War? The Langemarck Myth between Cultural Oblivion and Critical Memory in (West) Germany, 1945–2014’, Journal of Modern History 94, no. 1 (March 2022): 1–41.

55 Whitstable Times, 16 July, 16 August 1960.

56 Whitstable Times, 18 February 1961; 24 December 1960.

57 East Kent Gazette, 27 February 1964; Whitstable Times, 11 April 1964.

58 J. F. Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 12–20, 94–110.

59 Valérian Boudjemadi, Alexandra Posner, Jennifer Bastart, ‘Older People and Death-Thought Accessibility: The Association between Death and Older People in Memory’, Death Studies 46, no. 3 (2022): 666–74.

60 Mark Donnelly, Sixties Britain: Culture, Society and Politics (Harlow: Longman, 2005).

61 Whitstable Times, 1 July 1961.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark Connelly

Mark Connelly is Professor of Modern British History in the School of History at the University of Kent. His main research and teaching interests focus on the commemoration of the two world wars in the British Empire.

Tim Jones

Tim Jones is senior lecturer in the School of Creative Arts and Industries, Canterbury Christ Church University. His main research interests relate to amateur filmmaking and how it reflects local culture and identity.