Robert James

Popular culture and working-class taste in Britain 1930-39: a round of cheap diversions?

This book examines the relationship between class and culture in 1930s Britain. Focusing on the reading and cinema-going tastes of the working classes, Robert James landmark study combines rigorous historical analysis with a close textual reading of visual and written sources to appraise the role of popular leisure in this fascinating decade. Drawing on a wealth of original research, this lively and accessible book adds immeasurably to our knowledge of working-class leisure pursuits in this contentious period. It is a key intervention in the field, providing both an imaginative approach to the subject and an abundance of new material to analyse, thus making it an undergraduate and postgraduate must-have . It will be a particularly welcome addition for anyone interested in the fields of cultural and social history, as well as film, cultural and literary studies.

Kinematograph weekly in the 1930s: trade attitudes towards audience taste

The field of British film history has been transformed during the last two decades. Since the publication of Jeffrey Richards’ pioneering revisionist history The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain 1930-1939 (1984), film scholars and historians have used similarly revisionist methodologies to open up for critical revaluation a diverse range of topics on British cinema. Research conducted into the cinema-going habits of society in the 1930s has been particularly fruitful. Richards’ text provides the benchmark, but there have been a number of studies which explore in significant detail important, but often critically ignored, aspects of the film industry in the period. Film genres and visual style (Harper 1994), stars and the star-system (Stacey 1994), film popularity (Sedgwick 2000), and audiences (Kuhn 2003; Harper 2004) have all been the subject of detailed critical analysis. There is, then, a flourishing historiography of British cinema in the 1930s. What has been lacking, however, is a nuanced account of the complexity of audience taste. To be sure, some of the work mentioned above touches upon the issue. Harper (2004) conducts what is in effect a local study of taste in a Portsmouth cinema during the decade. But nothing broader has been attempted. Sedgwick’s work concentrates on popularity via receipts of bookings and distribution, but does not aim to provide a map of audience taste as a whole. Important gaps still exist, therefore, in the history of cinema-going in 1930s Britain. This article is intended to partly redress this. Based on a reading of Kinematograph Weekly (hereafter Kineweekly), arguably the cinema trade’s most important journal in the period, this article offers a historically revisionist perspective that problematises the complex issue of audience taste as perceived by those who were supposed to know it best: film trade personnel.

Cinema-going in a port town, 1914–1951: film booking patterns at the Queens Cinema, Portsmouth

This article examines the localized nature of leisure provision and consumer taste in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. Based on an analysis of the cinema-going habits of naval personnel and dockyard workers and their families in the naval town of Portsmouth, this article reveals how closely consumers’ tastes were predicated on their social and cultural identities. By mapping film booking patterns at one cinema, this article reveals how cinema managers chose to book films which responded directly to the tastes of their patrons. The article concludes that the film preferences of this community were shaped by their close connections with naval life.

‘A Very Profitable Enterprise’: South Wales Miners’ Institute Cinemas in the 1930S

There is limited evidence about the cinema-going tastes of the working classes in Britain during the 1930s. A range of contemporary sources provides information on cinema-going tastes at a general and non-class specific level—Sidney Bernstein’s Questionnaires; film popularity lists; box-office successes—but evidence about working-class tastes is scant. We can, however, assess the cinema-going tastes of one particular group of working-class consumers—the miners (and their families) of South Wales—through the surviving records of the South Wales Miners’ Institutes. These records, part of the South Wales Coalfield Collection held at the University of Wales, Swansea, UK, contain material relating to the day-to-day running of the Institutes’ cinemas. Among them are a number of cinema ledgers. To my knowledge, though, only one ledger from the 1930s remains extant. That ledger belongs to the Cwmllynfell Miners’ Welfare Hall cinema and runs from 29 March 1937 to 28 December 1939. The ledger lists first and second features, along with a number of other programmes, such as shorts and news-reels. There are a number of breaks in the ledger, so we need to cut our coat according to the cloth of the somewhat sporadic material available, but it is nevertheless a highly valuable resource when constructing a map of working-class taste in the period.

‘Read for victory’: public libraries and book reading in a British Naval Port City during the Second World War

Abstract In 1942, a library official in Portsmouth, UK appealed to the city’s inhabitants to ‘read for victory’, believing that they had a duty to use their reading time productively as part of their wartime activities. This article argues that long-standing desires among the country’s political and civic elites to encourage the nation’s readers to spend their leisure time prudently intensified during the Second World War. The public library service was utilised by civic leaders, library officials and publishing trade personnel to aid the country’s war effort. The article argues that negative attitudes regarding mass reading tastes remained largely static, despite recognition that the conflict drew people to the written word for relaxation and escapism. Using the naval city of Portsmouth as a case study, this article charts the activities of the city’s public library authorities and the borrowing habits of its readers to reveal that while many people borrowed books in order to distract themselves from the conflict, the city’s strategic importance ensured that many citizens also read in order to facilitate their preparedness for war service, whether that be on the home front or overseas. The article argues that while, in common with national trends, many of Portsmouth’s citizens used libraries to obtain books to help distract them from the war, many remained eager to make use of the service for educational purposes, unlike the majority of the nation’s library users, whose interest in this aspect of library provision rapidly waned as the war progressed. The article concludes that the public library service was viewed as a central plank in the war effort and that library officials worked continuously to ensure that it remained so.

‘If there’s one man that I admire, that man’s a British tar’: Leisure and Cultural Nation-Building in a Naval Port Town, c. 1850–1928

James analyses leisure in the naval port town of Plymouth in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries to reveal how the Royal Navy sailor, and more broadly the British navy, was appropriated to impart messages to the town’s citizens regarding notions of patriotism, heroism, and masculinity. Using a poem in the local paper as an example of the broader relationships that operated between civilian society and the Royal Navy sailor, James explores the networks of cultural nation-building that operated between the Royal Navy and Plymouth’s inhabitants, viewing leisure as an arena in which civic leaders and the press interacted with its sailortown community to both reconstruct the image of the Royal Navy sailor and negotiate the boundaries of acceptable and improper behaviour in its sailortown district.

Book Review: Hollywood in the neighborhood: historical case studies of local moviegoing

Film history has been transformed over the last two decades. Films are no longer viewed as merely texts, set apart in a cultural vacuum. Film historians are now giving increased consideration to the contexts of the films: their production, distribution, exhibition and consumption. Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley’s edited volume is an important addition to this trend. Significantly, though, this new collection disapproves of the tendency of many recent film histories to equate the emergence and popularity of cinema at the turn of the 20th century with the introduction of modernity. While being careful not to dismiss the ‘modernity thesis’ entirely, Fuller-Seeley and George Potamianos (in the Introduction) and Ronald G. Walters (in the Conclusion) draw attention to the weaknesses of this grand theory: it views movie-goers as a vast, homogenous group; it is too metropolitan in its focus; and it ignores continuities with the past. Edited by Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley