Picturing home

Domestic life and modernity in 1940s British film

Hollie Price, Jeffrey Richards

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781526138200
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526138224
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Picturing home examines the depiction of domestic life in British feature films made and released in the 1940s. It explores how pictorial representations of home onscreen in this period re-imagined modes of address that had been used during the interwar years to promote ideas about domestic modernity. Picturing home provides a close analysis of domestic life as constructed in eight films, contextualising them in relation to a broader, offscreen culture surrounding the suburban home, including magazines, advertisements, furniture catalogues and displays at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition. In doing so, it offers a new reading of British 1940s films, which demonstrates how they trod a delicate path balancing prewar and postwar, traditional and modern, private and public concerns.

1

‘Tea Table Politics’: mapping the industrial working-class home

During the 1940s, the tea table became a common trope in films focusing on industrial working-class characters and setting out realist-style depictions of their homes. Influenced by the iconography and ideals of the documentary movement, a number of films released in wartime and the postwar years mapped the living conditions of industrial workers using images of domestic life – particularly centring on the kitchen-living room used variously for meals, study and family gatherings. An early example, The Stars Look Down (d. Carol Reed, 1940), features establishing and close-up shots of a miner’s breakfast being laid in a cramped kitchen-living room, in contrast with the tea and cake surveyed with unease in the parlour of the middle-class home to which scholarship-boy son Davey (Michael Redgrave) later moves. In The Proud Valley (d. Pen Tennyson, 1940), the table is a site of community in a Welsh mining village, symbolising the acceptance of David Goliath (Paul Robeson), a black worker and an outsider to the village, into the family home. In the later postwar film Blue Scar (d. Jill Craigie, 1949), a miner’s dinner at a table in front of the fire is part of a domestic setting characterised by daily routine and close-knit family life – as his son is washed in a tin bath at his feet. Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life … (1957) marked the ‘good table’ as a key indicator of the respectability of a working-class household.¹ In these films, the tea table in the mining home is represented as a stronghold of upright working-class values, including respectability, in the face of otherwise difficult aspects of daily home and work life.

The onscreen image of the working-class table was more than simply a matter of authenticity of mise-en-scène. This everyday space was constructed to convey middle-class ideals of family life, habits and community, often portraying the industrial working-class home with a sense of romanticism. In Andrew Higson’s examination of British social realism, and Samantha Lay’s later study drawing on Higson, both detect a characteristic tension – between an observational address and a ߢfascinated gaze, which could render exotic and romanticize’ – in the depiction of working-class life in interwar documentaries.² is chapter further queries the tension between realism and romanticism that shaped working-class homes onscreen by resituating it as a mode of address developed by an earlier popular culture of social investigation in the 1930s.³ At this time, images of working-class domestic life were perpetuated in a variety of forms, mapping everyday living conditions and material circumstances for lower-middle and middle-class audiences as part of an image of modernity. By contextualising the depiction of domestic life in two films in relation to this interwar culture of social investigation, their realist address can be identified as part of a middlebrow cultural construction of industrial working-class domesticity articulating progressive ideas of the modern home and society.

Realism and romanticism

The growth of suburbia in the interwar years offered working-class people the opportunity to achieve social distinction by owning their homes for the first time. Nicola Humble emphasises that the suburbs were an important site for this ‘significant national transformation’, which ‘changed the lives of millions of people in the years between the wars by providing them with electricity, gas, bathrooms, and indoor lavatories’.⁴ Alongside this emphasis on private aspirations, the ‘so-called private’ homes of suburbia harboured an interest in ideas of community, social democracy and reform – in other words, a concern with the public.⁵ Humble suggests that ‘in the years after the First World War, the middle-class became increasingly self-conscious. Its members began to question their own identity, the role of their class and its future in the nation’.⁶ Similarly, Tom Jeffery notes that the rise of the ‘technological class’ was part of ‘a resurgence in lower-middle-class radicalism as war approached’ as ‘black-coated’ workers also moved to the left.⁷ In a growing trend for social investigation, industrial working-class living conditions were mapped with an emphasis on these progressive impulses, conveying middle-class ideals of reform, domestic improvement and community.

Mass-Observation, set up in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet Charles Madge and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, was a particularly influential part of this trend. An organisation dedicated to documenting the everyday life of the nation, it undertook directives exploring British homes, which included, for example, a survey in 1937 examining the objects and decorations kept and displayed on mantelpieces.⁸ Mass-Observation’s findings were published as Penguin Specials and disseminated as part of over a thousand local Left Book Club groups, and particularly in the suburbs and at lower-middle-class workplaces.⁹ Also published for the Left Book Club, J. B. Priestley’s English Journey: being a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through England during the autumn of the year 1933 (1934) detailed the material conditions of working-class life in the industrial North, including ‘fried-fish shops and dingy pubs’, and George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) studied working-class life in Yorkshire and Lancashire, interrogating the domestic lives of industrial working-class families with whom Orwell stayed during his investigation.¹⁰ The first section of Wigan Pier details the difficulties of unemployment and the grim realities of domestic life for Mr and Mrs Brooker. The state of the table is central to one particularly vivid exploration of their home:

In front of the fire there was always a line of damp washing, and in the middle of the room was the big kitchen table at which the family and all the lodgers ate. I never saw this table completely uncovered, but I saw all its various wrappings at different times. […] I used to get to know the individual crumbs by sight and watch their progress up and down the table from day to day.¹¹

This detailed attention to the topography of the table top – including its layers of different cloths and its ever-present crumbs – provides a tactile re-imagining of these spaces for the reader. In Orwell’s depiction of the unemployed man’s table, his tone is an accusatory one: the repetition of phrases including ‘there was always’, ‘I never saw this table’ and ‘I used to get to know the individual crumbs’, and sensory details including the ‘coarse’ and ‘sticky’ fabrics, evoke a particularly middle-class revulsion at these unsavoury conditions and thus the need for reform.

By contrast, in the homes belonging to employed workers, Orwell notes that ‘the memory of working-class interiors […] reminds me that our age has not been an altogether bad one to live in’.¹² Having detailed the conditions of the kitchen-living room table as if at a distance, from a middle-class point of view, he optimistically reminds the reader that the unique working-class culture belongs to ‘our age’ – an age shared by the imagined audience. This connection to the reader – and its implicit understanding of a striving for respectability and good living conditions – constructs the industrial working-class home according to a romanticised sense of shared community and the need for future improvement. Orwell’s study can be identified as middlebrow through its balance of realism – with its attention to the material conditions of unemployed life and the authentic depiction of working-class struggle – with romanticism, emphasised by his implication of the lower-middle- and middle-class reader in the social investigation of these intimate scenes. The industrial working-class home was effectively constructed as a spectacle – a composition which draws attention to the act of spectatorship – by making the suburban readership complicit in his social investigation of living conditions.

New technologies and a rising interest in ‘candid’ photography also enabled photographs of the intimate, everyday locales of the working-class home to negotiate this dynamic.¹³ For instance, in 1937 the Daily Herald published Harold Tomlin’s photograph of a working-class home alongside the caption ‘Tea Table Politics’. The photograph shows Labour MP Richard Crossman visiting the Robbins family in their home – ostensibly in the middle of a meal, in front of a large, Victorian-style hearth decorated with the large vases traditional to the working-class living room (Figure 4). The photograph of a private family scene draws attention to the realist view of everyday life on offer: the surface of the table laid for tea as a potent symbol of intimacy, ritual and community. However, as Deborah Frizzell and others have shown, there was some disjunction between ‘candid’ shots and ‘composed and atmospheric, almost pictorialist’ photographs which conveyed a particular set of ideas or constructs at this time as part of this ‘enrolment’.¹⁴ Photographs of the intimate, everyday locales of the working-class home ‘enrolled’ the viewer in a ‘politics of vision’ at the heart of which was an implicit understanding of a striving for respectability and good living conditions.

The arrangement of the Robbins family around the table and the position of the camera (maintained at Crossman’s eye level) in Tomlin’s photograph emphasise a more formal composition drawing attention to the spectacle of the family around the bright, communal table. As such, it highlights the respectability and cleanliness of the Robbinses’ home lives and thus indicates the conditions of social reform that Crossman offered. By evoking these middle-class ideals of ritual, respectability and reform, the photograph of the everyday tea table stands as a modern ‘manifestation of a middlebrow politics’, in an address to the observer comparable to the middlebrow construction put forward by Orwell.¹⁵ Constructing ‘a space of representation’ or a ‘politics of vision’ – terms used in studies of photography – but what I consider as constructing a specifically middlebrow address concerned with realism and romanticism, photographs in this style constructed a narrative which combined an observational attention to material details with an idea of the relationship between private home and community that was optimistic and forward-looking.¹⁶

4 Tea Table Politics, Daily Herald (April 1937)

The rest of this chapter takes up the balance between realism and romanticism evide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• General editor’s foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘’Mid pleasures and palaces’
• 1 ‘Tea Table Politics’: mapping the industrial working-class home
• 2 Pastoral images: capturing ‘A Landscape from Within’
• 3 Dream palaces: transforming the domestic interior
• 4 Interior lives: imagining private visions of home
• Conclusion: ‘The best of both worlds’
• Bibliography
• Index