Cinemas and cinemagoing in wartime Britain, 1939–45: The utility dream palace

By Richard Farmer

In this groundbreaking book, Richard Farmer provides a social and cultural history of cinemas and cinemagoing in Britain between 1939 and 1945, and explores the impact that the war had on the places in which British people watched films.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784997809

Richard Farmer

Richard Farmer is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Film Studies at University College London

Book preview

Introduction

After some seven months of Sitzkrieg, the Second World War on the western front burst into terrifying life in the spring of 1940. On 9 April, German troops entered Denmark and Norway. There was no time for Britain and France to offer any resistance to save the former, whilst the Allies failed in their attempt to prevent the fall of the latter. Indeed, so wretchedly unsuccessful was Britain’s campaign in Norway that it accounted for the premiership of Neville Chamberlain, who was replaced by Winston Churchill on 10 May. On the day that Churchill assumed office, the German army launched invasions of France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The advance was swift: the Netherlands surrendered on 15 May, Belgium less than a fortnight later. By the time that King Leopold’s government sued for peace, Operation Dynamo had begun, and nearly 200,000 members of the British Expeditionary Force and more than 100,000 of its French allies were being evacuated from Dunkirk. A war that only weeks before had still seemed distant was suddenly less than thirty miles from British soil.

As it became increasingly obvious that the German advance on the Channel ports would not be stopped, and as it became clear that France would soon fall, the authorities in Britain turned their attention to assessing the impact of these events on British morale. There were very real concerns in official circles that the fighting spirit of the civilian population would wither in anticipation of a German assault, and the Ministry of Information (MoI) established a Home Morale Emergency Committee in an attempt to analyse and if necessary counteract just such an occurrence. Much of the MoI’s information about morale came from Home Intelligence reports, produced daily between May and September 1940, and at weekly intervals thereafter. These reports distilled material gathered from a wide range of different sources – police reports, BBC listener surveys, Gallup polls and the Ministry’s own Regional Intelligence Officers, to name but a few – and although they tended towards the impressionistic the final product was, according to Robert Mackay, ‘unlikely to be very far from the truth’.¹ The picture painted by Home Intelligence in May 1940 was decidedly ambivalent: ‘unstable and detailed reports over the last fortnight show in a striking way the day-to-day swing of public feeling: anxiety, optimism, pessimism [and] bewilderment chase one another over succeeding days’.²

This picture would have been recognised by anyone reading the Mass-Observation diaries produced by Christopher Tomlin during May 1940, which combine a sense of confusion and fear and a determination not to let the side down. Thus we find Tomlin expressing his growing horror at the realisation that the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were proving more than a match for their Allied counterparts:

Such feelings, however, could only be confided, and in strictest confidence, to Mass-Observation: ‘Of course, I am determined to keep these thoughts to myself. I will try to steady people’s morale.’ The ‘of course’ is telling, and speaks of a more widespread practice of attempting to hide real and palpable anxieties beneath a veneer of stoicism. No matter how great his concerns, it seems unlikely that Tomlin would have voiced them in a public place where they might have been overheard by someone gathering intelligence for the MoI.

Assessing morale was (and is) clearly a complex task; people do not always express or even understand the full range of their feelings. Individuals frequently experience simultaneously conflicting emotions and attitudes: as they vie for attention within the individual, it is difficult to assess which are most likely to determine behaviour. A qualitative assessment of morale – such as to be found in the Home Intelligence reports and the Mass-Observation diaries – is therefore likely to require a fair degree of extrapolation and conjecture. Understanding this, Stephen Taylor of the MoI’s Home Intelligence unit, proposed in October 1941 that actions rather than feelings might afford a more accurate gauge of morale, a phenomenon that was ‘ultimately measured not by what a person thinks or says, but by what he does and how he does it’.⁴ Taylor called, essentially, for a more quantitative approach to morale, one which was based on observing people’s actions as well as their attitudes. And whilst a quantitative assessment might not explain why it is that people feel the way that they do – or even outline in any detail what it is that they feel – it does offer some insight into how feelings affect actions. In the case of Britain during the Second World War, such actions have often been understood in terms of the direct contribution that an individual might make to the war effort – in terms of factory output, for example, or in the hours spent on Home Guard duty. But surely we should also consider the hundreds of prosaic and mundane activities that constitute everyday life. To attempt to maintain personal routine in the face of the disquieting realities of wartime is to proclaim a certain faith in the country’s ability to survive and function along something approximating normal lines. Conversely, to abandon elements of that routine as a result of wartime conditions is to make an unspoken declaration of underlying nervousness, even if loudly and publically professing confidence.

It was with such an idea in mind that the Metropolitan Police attempted to gauge the public mood in London, a city that the MoI believed to have notably lower morale during the spring of 1940 than other parts of Britain.⁵ Looking to see if the grim news from the continent was changing patterns of behaviour on the Home Front, the Met turned to the cinema. Divisional Superintendents around London were asked to submit reports outlining how, or indeed if, ‘present war conditions’ and the fear of imminent German action against the United Kingdom had affected attendance at the places of entertainment found in the area they policed. Whilst in some districts ticket sales on 10 and 11 May compared favourably to a normal Friday or Saturday night, in many others the picture was grim, with West End box offices doing only a little over two-thirds of expected business on the night of 11 May.⁶ In Leicester Square, home to a number of prestigious first-run picture houses, the numbers were particularly bad, and not even Gone With the Wind (1939), which was then playing at the Empire, was immune from the sense of panic (see Table 1).⁷

Table 1 Attendance figures for select Leicester Square cinemas, 10 May 1940

Source: TNA HO 186/229: Memo from Assistant-Superintendent ‘C’ Division to ACD, 11 May 1940.

It is telling that the entertainments industry was recognised to be a barometer for the mood of ordinary Londoners. For even though, as one trade paper noted, ‘the fact that box-office attendances had taken an appalling nose-dive all over the country … appeared to be of almost minor importance’ when compared to events in France and Belgium, it is clear that by 1940 a night at the pictures had become so normalised an action for millions of Britons that disruptions to expected patterns of cinemagoing were recognised as reliable indicators that something, somewhere was amiss.⁸ And whilst the Met’s methodology was far from perfect – not least in that there were a host of factors that might have affected attendance – the data collected offer an interesting glimpse both of the darkness of the mood in some quarters, and of the linkages that anchored the cinema’s crucial role in wartime life within the realities of wartime existence.

The Met seemed convinced of the causal relationship between morale and people’s willingness to spend a night at the pictures: the more dispirited an individual felt, the less likely they were to visit the cinema. But although this is certainly plausible, it only looks at the issue that morale might have on cinemagoing, and fails to take into account the impact that cinemagoing (and by this I do not mean simply watching films) might have on morale. In their study of working-class cultural practices during the blitz, Brad Beaven and John Griffiths propose that ‘the most consistent and influential variable to affect working-class morale was the degree to which working-class communities were able to function as close to pre-war times as possible’.⁹ Not going to the cinema might be indicative of poor morale; not being able to participate in the ritual of cinemagoing – be that as a result of financial, martial, logistical or social factors – had the potential to bring about poor morale.

Cinemagoing is something that people do. And because the cinema as a social practice and cultural institution is so fully embedded within the patterns of everyday life, it is acutely sensitive to the changing nature of the world in which it and its patrons exist. For although cinema is often characterised in terms of the escape it provided from the workaday, it was only able to make such sustained attempts to fulfil this ambition as the result of the position it occupied within the real world: where people were escaping from was as important to the popular experience of the cinema as where they were escaping to. The cinema was not distinct from normal life; it was, for tens of millions of Britons, a crucial part of it.

British exhibitors had for many years recognised and traded upon the linkage that existed between their cinemas and the environments in which they operated, and further understood that factors pertaining in those environments had the potential to affect the public’s inclination to attend the cinema, for both good and ill. It was widely recognised that cinemagoing was a seasonal activity, with lower attendance figures in summer than in winter. Taking this one step further, the managers of venues such as the Playhouse and Palace cinemas in Edinburgh kept a meteorological record to see if the weather had a similar ability to influence ticket sales.¹⁰ Indeed, the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association (CEA) noted in its annual report that 1936 had been ‘fortunate from [the exhibitor’s] point of view in the enjoyment of a wet summer which kept attendances normal’. Because hot, dry weather encouraged outdoor activities, rain was the cinema manager’s friend.

But in almost the next breath the CEA noted that what precipitation giveth, a precipitous political crisis taketh away: ‘the abdication of the reigning king [on 10 December 1936] … was an event to be remembered, not only for its national importance, but also because it effectively emptied cinemas until the close of the year’. The abdication was clearly a unique moment in the history of the British cinema, but the Association used it to draw wider-reaching conclusions:

Every national event has a reaction upon the cinema, so largely does it enter into the lives of the people. When an event of this kind happens that absorbs the interest of the people, it does so outside cinemas and it is almost impossible to persuade them to maintain their regular attendances.¹¹

This was no less true during the war, a ‘national event’ of quite extraordinary prominence and duration, and time and again the trade press contained reports of attendances fluctuating in response to events as dramatic as the blackout or the blitz, or as prosaic as the changing of the clocks or the seasons.

This book will explore the interconnectedness of cinema and society in Britain during the Second World War not only in terms of the impact that the war had on British cinemas and cinemagoing between 1939 and 1945, but also in terms of how the cinema existed within wartime Britain. Few elements of cinemagoing remained untouched by the war, and, therefore, there are few elements of cinemagoing that cannot tell us something about what British life was like during the war. The history of British cinemas in wartime is in many ways the history of wartime Britain, for the changes wrought in British society all had an effect on the exhibition industry, cinema managers and cinemagoers. These changes, often introduced individually and incrementally, might appear insignificant; indeed, some were. But when taken together, they represented a sustained assault on the established norms of the pre-war cinemagoing experience. This is not to say that British cinemas lost all appeal during the war; one need only look at the rapid increase in tickets sales, particularly from 1941, to see that this was not remotely the case. Rather, it is to recognise that the war had a direct and decisive impact on the way in which people accessed, thought about and experienced the cinema in Britain after September 1939. Britons could still spend a night at the pictures, and did so with increasing frequency, but this does not mean that the cinema was able to sail through the war untouched by the events taking place in the world around it.

The dream palace

You or I and the people of England do not go to cinema theatres because they are big buildings or because they are very magnificent to look at. People go to see films that they wish to see … [and if necessary] will go and see that film in a tent in a field.¹²

To Lord Brabazon, who made this claim in the House of Lords in 1944, the cinema was simply a building (and sometimes not even that) in which films were screened. But although in the cinema’s infancy exhibitors did run film shows in tents in fields, this phase soon passed. Exhibitors came to be convinced of the economic rewards that might accrue from establishing cinemas as urban fixtures that constituted a physical riposte in brick, mortar, faience, glass, Snowcrete and neon to Brabazon’s way of thinking. Exhibitors began to lavish vast sums on their most prestigious cinemas (and not insignificant sums on their other venues) in the belief that such an outlay was justified by the likelihood of increased box-office receipts.¹³ This was certainly the case at many Granada cinemas, where opulence and grandiosity were the watchwords of magnate Sidney Bernstein’s relationship with designer Theodore Komisarjevsky. At Tooting, for example, Granada set out to recreate ‘the world of the Palazzo on the Grand Canal … in the midst of South London’.¹⁴ Exhibitors were in the business of recognising and catering to the desires of the public, and although the film remained central to this model, the exhibition industry was convinced that the experiential pleasures offered by a visit to the cinema should not be discounted.

There were, of course, enough ‘flea-pits’ and ‘bug-hutches’ in Britain to demonstrate that the exhibition industry’s business model was not founded exclusively on the creation of an opulent environment. Indeed, at the end of 1934, when Simon Rowson conducted the first systematic survey of the British exhibition industry, he estimated that more than half the cinemas in Britain had fewer than 800 seats, and that one in five had 500 seats or less.¹⁵ Smaller venues such as these were less likely to be able to dedicate the same resources as were larger theatres to the creation of a luxurious environment. However, a great number of cinemas, especially those erected or refurbished during the cinema-building boom of the early 1930s, were statements intended to promote the cinema as a site of sensory and experiential possibility, as an environment with its own genius loci.¹⁶ Recent research has suggested that even the earliest permanent-site cinemas, whether constructed specifically or converted from existing buildings, were intended to manipulate the senses and create an experiential environment dedicated to establishing the wonder of film.¹⁷

To get a feel for the non-filmic pleasures on offer, one need only look at the design of and amenities and services offered by British cinemas in the 1930s. When the Paramount cinema opened in Newcastle in the autumn of 1931, a special commemorative promotional brochure – the Paramount News – was issued to mark the event. It contained a piece by Stuart Jackson, film critic of the Newcastle Evening World, which gave a detailed overview of ‘this luxurious Cathedral of Motion Pictures’:

Wide staircases branched to the palatial regions above my head, and on my way up I glanced in at the lounges and smoke-rooms and the cosmetic cubicles where, amid futuristic splendour, Newcastle’s femininity will be able to apply powder-puff and lip-stick provided gratuitously by Paramount. Every piece of beautiful furniture has been specially designed to Paramount’s own specification.

In short, ‘Paramount are setting a standard of luxury and entertainment which will captivate the senses and enchant the eye.’¹⁸ In such an environment, films were clearly only one of the pleasures on offer.

By the mid-1930s, the extravagance of many ‘super-cinemas’ had become something of a running joke, and it was surely gushing promotional material of the type issued in Newcastle that the cartoonist Joseph Lee had in mind when he drew a glamorously attired usherette, standing in marble-columned splendour beneath signs for various cafés, palm courts, snuggeries and lounges: ‘Pictures? Pictures? Let me see now. Yes, I believe we have some pictures showing somewhere’ (see Figure 1).

Even though large, city centre super-cinemas – the most expansive of which could seat several thousand paying customers – were the exceptions rather than the rule, they were thought by many to constitute the apotheosis of the cinemagoing ideal.¹⁹ Cinemas the length and breadth of the country lined up to align themselves with the supers, and were keen to discuss those aspects of their décor, facilities or service that set them apart from, or allowed them to compete with, their immediate rivals. The £20,000 spent in 1930 converting Her Majesty’s theatre in Dundee into the Majestic cinema allowed its owners to ‘spare no effort in making it the finest and most modern … in Scotland’, and some of its advertised features hint at how luxury and modernity were conceived of in 1930s Britain:

The heating … will be a model of well-regulated comfort.

A café is at hand, and telephone booths are available for the convenience of patrons.

Vacuum cleaning is to be carried out all over the building, ensuring the absence of dust.

The central role that films played was not ignored, however, and great play was made of the fact that ‘a perfect view of the screen will be obtainable from every part of the theatre’ and that ‘efficient reproduction of the sound films to be shown is assured’ by the installation of ‘up-to-date’ Western Electric ‘talkie apparatus’.²⁰

Rowson’s survey found that in 1934 there were some 4,305 cinemas operating in Britain, a number that was to rise to approximately 4,800 by 1939, offering a combined total of 3.8 million seats. Or, to put it another way, one cinema for every 10,600 men, women and children in the country, and one seat for every twelve.²¹ Whilst there were concerns about over-capacity, especially in the wake of the period of rapid expansion in the first half of the 1930s, a report prepared by Mass-Observation in 1942 found that ‘The minimum economic catchment area of the cinema … is sometimes put at 7,000 population.’²² The accuracy of this figure might be contested, but what it makes clear is that cinemas could be commercially viable even in relatively small towns, something that was no longer the case by the mid-1960s: ‘Visiting small country towns – Hereford, Newmarket, Sudbury, for example – one realises what a vastly different place cinemagoing had in the social life of the inter-war and early post-war periods for towns of this size to give rise to two cinemas.’²³ Larger cities could, of course, support greater numbers. In 1934, Bolton and Brighton each had eighteen cinemas catering to populations of 180,000 and 200,000 respectively, whilst Portsmouth’s 250,000 inhabitants could choose to spend a night at the pictures at any one of 21 different venues.²⁴ In Dundee, there was an even greater concentration: a population of less than 200,000 was served by as many as 28 different cinemas during the 1930s.²⁵

1 ‘Pictures? Pictures? Let me see now. Yes, I believe we have some pictures showing somewhere.’ Joseph Lee in London Evening News,12 March 1935.

The sheer number of cinemas meant that the exhibition industry was a very real and extremely visible presence in British urban environments. Numerical preponderance aside, cinemas were conspicuous features of many towns because they were intended to be so. Buildings designed to screen films were rarely coy, and were most often designed to dominate their environs, attract attention and ‘brazenly flaunt their dominance in the life of the nation’.²⁶ Whilst the 120-foot tower on the Gaumont State cinema in Kilburn, north London, was an unusually forceful statement of intent, its immodestly monumental scale did epitomise the muscular confidence of the exhibition industry in the 1930s. The tower at the Gaumont State could be seen from several miles away, and physically manifested the way in which the cinema dominated the High Streets, the cultural landscape and the imaginative geographies of Britain.²⁷

And dominate it did. In Ipswich in 1939, more than half of evenings spent outside the home were spent at the cinema,²⁸ whilst in the winter of 1940–41 the Ministry of Labour found that amongst the industrial working class, 65 per cent of expenditure on entertainments went to the cinema, with 56 per cent of agricultural working-class entertainment expenditure going on the same despite there being fewer cinemas in rural parts of the country. In industrial areas, the average family’s weekly outgoing on entertainments amounted to 1s. 4½d. (1.6 per cent of total expenditure), of which 10¾d. was spent on picturegoing, 2¾d. on sporting events and 3d. on live entertainments such as the music hall. Some contemporary observers believed these figures to underestimate the amount spent on entertainments, and hence on the cinema, citing the ‘well-known tendency of informants of family budgets not to appear too extravagant on luxuries or semi-luxuries’ and on the fact that entertainments were often paid for out of ‘unaccounted pocket money’.²⁹

Table 2 Admissions statistics for British cinemas, 1939–46 (in millions)

Source: H. E. Browning and A. A. Sorrell, ‘Cinemas and cinemagoing in Great Britain’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 117:2 (1954), p. 134.

By the time the war started, some 19 million tickets were being sold each week, and this number grew rapidly during the war (see Table 2). Given that the population of the United Kingdom in this period was somewhere in the region of 45 million, it becomes clear just how much time British people spent going to (and from, and in) the cinema. On average, in 1939, two people in five visited the cinema each week; in 1945, two in three. Higher wages and a greater desire for relaxation both fed into the massive increase in cinema attendance during the war. So, too, did reduced competition from rival leisure providers. Professional football and cricket leagues, for example, were suspended for much of the war, and although the fixtures arranged between scratch sides were frequently very well attended, the irregularity of such fixtures and the fact that teams rarely featured the same players from one match to the next meant that they did not hold the public imagination in the same manner as peacetime competitions. The rhythm of sporting fandom was disrupted in a way that cinema fandom was not.

But bold numbers such as these do not tell the whole story. A study conducted in 1943 by the Wartime Social Survey for the MoI found that cinemagoing was not uniformly popular: almost a third of those questioned either never or only rarely visited the cinema, a third went no more than once a fortnight, whilst the remaining third – which accounted for the bulk of ticket sales – went at least once a week. Issues of class, age and gender all played important roles in determining into which group a respondent was likely to fall. Thus, the working class accounted for a disproportionately high proportion of ticket sales, the young went more than the middle aged or the old and women were slightly more enthusiastic about the cinema than were men, with each of these tendencies becoming more pronounced in those who went most regularly.³⁰ Further, Rowson’s 1934 survey found that four out of every five tickets purchased at British box offices cost no more than a shilling (inclusive of Entertainments Tax), and, of these, half cost 7d. or less – the cheap seats were often the most crowded.³¹

Although it is true that in terms of the money spent at the box office, or the cumulative hours that the British people spent in the auditorium, the cinema was undoubtedly ‘the essential social habit of the age’, it is also true that cinemagoing was far from being a monolithic phenomenon.³² This was the case at the regional, national and personal levels: cinemas within cities varied widely and as a consequence offered similarly varied experiences; clear contrasts could be drawn between venues in different regions (especially so between urban and rural halls); and cinemagoers made use of particular venues at different times – the flea-pit might suffice during the week, but a super might be more appropriate for the weekend or on a special occasion.

What’s more, the power exercised by local laws and local licensing authorities and watch committees meant that cinema exhibition was shaped by the specificities of place, evolving in response to local events, cultures, tastes and prejudices. The arguments that raged over Sunday opening – discussed in Chapter 2 – allow for an exploration of this localism, but censorship is another issue that was often handled at the local level. Scarface (1932), for example, was banned in more than 100 towns and cities (including Manchester and Birmingham), whilst other, sometimes neighbouring, localities permitted its exhibition: Preston and Bath banned the film, Blackpool and Bristol allowed it to be screened.³³ When the film was reissued in 1938, the Lido cinema in Lichfield took full advantage of its location on an island of permissiveness in a sea of prohibition by declaring that Scarface ‘cannot be seen elsewhere for miles around’.³⁴

Travelling between towns to watch films, or even between distant suburbs within the same city, might not have been the norm, but clearly it did happen. Inhabitants of rural areas seeking to while away a few hours at the nearest local cinema might have to travel not inconsiderable distances to take in a picture show. In an age before widespread car ownership, this meant that many cinemagoers travelled to the cinema on bicycles or on foot, or were reliant upon – or alternatively, were at the mercy of – local public transport infrastructure and timetables.³⁵ The crucial role that public transport played in facilitating popular consumption of the cinema worked to ground venues within particular environments and made them most readily accessible to those who knew the route of the no. 32 bus or the fastest way to get to the Regal when the Rex was full.³⁶ In this sense, bus, tram and train timetables were as important as screening times when planning a trip to the cinema, especially in a period of continuous programming.

Before the advent of widespread television ownership in the 1950s, to watch a film – to watch moving pictures of any kind – was, with a very few exceptions, to visit the cinema; and to visit the cinema was ‘an event that also involved other people, performances (cinematic and non-cinematic), things (furniture and architecture), spaces, technologies and experiences: tastes, smells, sounds and sights’.³⁷ Until relatively recently, scholars of the cinema have been able to maintain, with some accuracy, that ‘the field of film studies has ignored a rather important component of the film industry, its audience’.³⁸ The growth of academic interest in the people who watched films, the ways in which they watched and thought about them and the places in which they were screened means that cinemagoing and the exhibition industry are no longer the mysteries that they once were.³⁹ It is still the case, though, that if we hope to comprehend how the cinema as an institution functioned within society, we need to supplement the literature on individual films, particular genres and specific stars or directors with a more comprehensive understanding of cinemagoing as a social practice. This book does not seek to contest the centrality of the film in relation to the meaning of, and pleasures offered by, the cinema. Films and the entertainment that they provided clearly constituted the purpose of the cinema, and variations in ticket sales for different programmes at the same venue demonstrate that questions of taste are central to understanding the appeal and economics of the cinema.⁴⁰ The film, as Shakespeare so nearly said, is the thing. But it was not the only thing, and to marginalise those aspects of the cinema that exist outside the nexus of projector, screen and spectator is to ignore alternative ways of thinking about what the cinema was (and is), how it works and why people so often found it to be such an important and enjoyable element of their lives. As Roger Manvell asserted, ‘There is more in cinemagoing than seeing films.’⁴¹

The utility dream palace

The subtitle of this book, The utility dream palace, plays on some the meanings that the word ‘utility’ had in wartime Britain. First, it introduces the idea that, for many Britons, the cinema had become so essential an element of lived experience that it might be considered alongside electricity, gas and water as a public service. And just as the breakdown of public services had a direct impact on the ways in which people lived in and thought about British society during the war, so disruptions to the established norms of the cinema were also capable of bringing about similar re-evaluations. A lack of films was, of course, not comparable to a loss of light or heat or water, but it was of a part, an element of the more generally chaotic conditions that the war could produce.

Indeed, the trade journal Cinema and Theatre Construction insisted that in the years before the Second World War ‘We demanded at all times that cinemas … be worthy additions to the amenities of the districts they served.’⁴² Such language makes clear the fact that cinemas were thought of as having not only a utilitarian function, but also a utilitarian purpose. Although they were private commercial enterprises they also constituted civic facilities to be considered alongside libraries, art galleries, public baths and municipal parks and gardens, and could therefore contribute to the life of the community in which they were situated. Such high-blown idealism may not always, or even regularly, have been realised, but it points to an idea that the cinema had a role to play as, in the words of Oscar Deutsch, ‘a public servant’.⁴³

The usefulness of the cinema – and the uses of cine-literacy – came to the fore during the Second World War. Cinemas were expected to educate and entertain, to draw people’s attention to the mutable realities of the world around them whilst also absenting them from it, to aggregate groups of disparate individuals into something approaching the unified community idealised in so much British wartime propaganda. Films of all kinds were, of course, crucial to the service the cinema provided the British public, but cinemas as physical locations were also used to relay information about the war to patrons; education might take place in the foyer, or on the stage, as well as, or even instead of, on the screen. Similarly, the cinema as a site of sensory experience worked alongside the film to afford pleasure to patrons, and to determine that their experience was a communal one. For although an audience might have gathered in order to watch a certain programme in a particular venue at a specific time, any sense of community that might have been evinced by a night