This is a PowerPoint presentation from 2013 celebrating the 80th anniversary of the GPO Film Unit

1. Empire Marketing Board
1926 (1930 film) - 1933
Crown Film Unit
1940 - 1952
Central Office of Information
1946 - 2012
The GPO Film Unit
1933 - 1940

4. George Osborne
and Boris Johnson
make a trade
Mission to China
Perhaps!! the work
of the
Empire Marketing
Board still goes on
today!!!!

5. On a more serious not
and back to the story

6. The Empire Marketing Board was formed in May
1926 by the Colonial Secretary Leo Amery to
promote intra-Empire trade and to persuade
consumers to 'BUY EMPIRE'
Leopold Charles Maurice Stennett
Amery Companion of Honour
(22 November 1873 – 16 September 1955)

7. It was actually established as a substitute for tariff
reform and protectionist legislation and this is why it
was eventually abolished in 1933, as a system of
imperial preference replaced free trade.
Amery was its first Chairman, Sir Stephen George
Tallents its Secretary, Edward Mayow Hastings Lloyd its
Assistant Secretary, and Walter Elliot was Chairman of
its Research Committee.
Sir Stephen George
Tallents
Walter Elliot

8. The Empire Marketing Board had three principal
aims:
publicity for Empire trade.
promotion of economic analysis; and
to support scientific research;

9. Tallents decided that EMB's staff should employ
personnel directly from the media and the advertising
industry - as well as giving commissions to some of the
most talented poster artists of the day.
Scientific research took up a large proportion of the
EMB's work and budget.
It also assisted 126 agricultural and medical research
projects and issued many Intelligence Notes,
pamphlets and surveys.
The EMB made links with buyers and produced
analyses of markets to help producers.

10. The EMB organised poster campaigns, exhibitions,
'Empire Shopping Weeks', Empire shops, lectures, radio
talks, schools tour, its own library, advertisements in the
national and local press and of shop window displays.
 Drifters (North Sea herring),
 Solid Sunshine (which promoted New Zealand butter),
 The Song of Ceylon (tea),
 Wheatfields of the Empire,
 Industrial Britain and One Family
Most famous was the EMB film unit led by John
Grierson, often considered the father of modern
documentary film, which produced around 100 films with
such names as

11. Although moving film had been first shown in 1896, film
was not used by the EMB until 1930. The EMB is more
famous for its beautiful and unique collection of
industrial art, of which 222 were designed between 1926
and 1933. These are now housed at the Manchester Art
Gallery, but for many years have been hidden from the
world on dusty museum shelves. These delightful
coloured posters many designed by leading artists of
the day were usually shown in a block of five posters
As shown at the V & A Museum in 1931 at an exhibition of British & Foreign Posters

12. Five row of posters in a street in Carlise

13. They Shall Beat Their Swords Into Plowshares
And Their Spears Into Pruning Hooks.
Nation Shall Not Lift Up A Sword Against Nation
Neither Shall They Learn War Any More
Empire Buying Make Busy Factories

14. A Blast Furnace
Artist: Clive Gardiner 1927

15. The Market garden of the tropics – Buy Malaysian
Pineapples
Buy from the Empire’s Gardens

16. Untitled from the series
‘Christmas Fare from the Empire’
Designed by F. C. Harrison

17. A view of the Empire Marketing Board Pavilion North East
Coast Exhibition Newcastle upon Tyne taken in 1929. The
photograph shows the Lady Mayoress of Newcastle upon
Tyne stirring the Empire Christmas Pudding watched by
three women wearing white overalls and mob caps. The
recipe for the Empire Christmas Pudding is attached to

18. "Gibraltar" by Charles Pears
for the Empire Marketing Board
1930

19. Empire Marketing Board poster designed to encourage
trade between the then Irish Free State and Great
Britain. The artist was Margaret Clarke (1888-1961), one
of only three Irish artists commissioned by the Empire
“You scratch my back”

20. "Empire Builders"
by Fred Taylor for the Empire Marketing Board 1930

21. Tea Pickers In Ceylon
Lancashire Cotton
exported to India

22. Colonial governments were reluctant to join the EMB,
however. The EMB was ended September 1933 as a
result of government cuts and the introduction of
Imperial Preference.
The film unit was moved to GPO Film Unit

23. The General Post Office film unit established by Sir
Stephen Tallents from the EMB in 1933 will be forever
associated with John Grierson and his idea of
documentary cinema.

24. During his spell in charge (1933-1937), Grierson
oversaw the creation of a film school that he attempted
to direct towards a socially useful purpose. J. B.
Priestley remembered:
“if you wanted to see what camera and sound could
really do, you had to see some little film sponsored
by the post office or the Gas, Light & Coke
company.”

25. This early strand of the GPO Unit’s filmmaking is best
represented by its ‘masterpiece’, Night Mail (1936),
which borrowed from the aesthetics of Soviet cinema to
turn an explanation of the work of the travelling post
office into a hymn to collective labour. To quote
Priestley again:
“Grierson and his young men, with their contempt for
easy big prizes and soft living, their taut social
conscience, their rather Marxist sense of the
contemporary scene always seemed to me at least a
generation ahead of the dramatic film people.”

26. The nightly run of the postal
special train from London to
Glasgow. Narrator - Pat
Jackson
The first film we are going to see is:
Night Mail (1936 – 24 mins B/W) was one of the
most critically acclaimed films to be produced
within the British documentary film movement. It
was also among the most commercially
successful, and remains the film most commonly

27. The film begins with a voiceover commentary describing
how the mail is collected for transit.
Inside the train the process of sorting takes place. As the
train nears its destination there is a sequence - the best
known in the film, in which Auden's spoken verse and
Britten's music are combined over montage images of
Night Mail is an account of the
operation of the Royal Mail
train delivery service, and
shows the various stages and
procedures of that operation.
Then, as the train proceeds along
the course of its journey, we are
shown the various regional railway
stations at which it collects and
deposits mail.

28. The film was the product of collaborative, rather than
individual authorship. Although it was primarily directed
by Harry Watt, Basil Wright developed the script, and
had overall production responsibility for the project.
The music score was
arranged by Benjamin Britten
and Cavalcanti, and the
rhyming verse used in the
film - spoken by Pat Jackson -
was written by W.H. Auden,
who also acted as assistant
The resulting film was edited by Wright and Alberto
Cavalcanti; John Grierson and Stuart Legg were also
involved in its production, along with Chick Fowle and
Jonah Jones as cameramen.

29. First and foremost, the GPO
Film Unit was responsible
for promoting the
reputation of the GPO,
emphasising the scale and
success of its technological
ambitions.This task informed the
bombast of films like the
comparatively big budget
BBC – The Voice of Britain
(1935), as well as the
internationalist idealism of
We Live in Two Worlds
(1937), which envisaged
how new communications
technology would herald
the coming of a global

30. This thematic technophilia
was also reflected in the
Unit’s method, especially in
the sound experiments
organised by the Brazilian
émigré Alberto Cavalcanti.
Among the GPO’s sonic
achievements was the first
use of recorded speech
(6.30 Collection, 1934),
modernist experiments in
sound montage (Song of
Ceylon, 1934) and the
employ of now feted
composers such as
Benjamin Britten, Maurice

31. This straightforward early GPO production builds on the
long-established pattern of industrial 'process'
documentaries with characteristic documentary movement
touches.
The second film we are going to see is:
The emphasis of 6.30 Collection, is set in a London sorting
office, may be on the logistics of organising the incoming
mail for delivery across the nation, but the implication is
that these are social as well as mechanical processes - that
the anonymous human beings and equipment (behind the
scenes and rarely thought of) involved in the apparently
mundane business of getting letters moved around the
country are central to modern society's smooth functioning.

32. The most ambitious film yet attempted by the GPO Film
Unit, BBC - The Voice of Britain was heralded by one
reviewer as "by far, the most important
'documentary' that has yet been made."
The third film or part of, that we are going to
see is:
Featuring: Stanley Baldwin,
Ramsay MacDonald, George
Lansbury, David Low, George
Bernard Shaw, G.K. Chesterton,
H.G. Wells, J.B. Priestley and
many others.
It was also the most expensive documentary to have been
made costing more than £7000 and it was probably the first
GPO film to use synchronised sound. The impressionistic
approach did not go down well with many contemporary
critics, who were disappointed at the lack of detail about

33. There are well over 300 films made
during 1930 – 1950 and many of
them are contained in these 4 DVDs
There are many more from the
Ministry of Information’s
CrownFilm Unit

34. A few months into World War Two in
September 1939, the GPO Film Unit
was transferred to the Films Division
of the MINISTRY OF
INFORMATION.
Its new name – THE CROWN FILM
UNIT – reflected its special status as
film producer for the state itself.