Spare Time

"Spare Time" was one of a number of documentary films produce in the 1930s by the GPO Film Unit. The original purpose of the unit was to make films publicising the work of the British Post Office, and it did indeed make a number of films on this theme, such as the famous "Night Mail". Many of its film-makers, however, interpreted their brief much more widely, producing a series of documentaries about all aspects of British life, and "Spare Time" is one of these.

The director was Humphrey Jennings, also a founder of Mass-Observation. Although this organisation existed purely to carry out sociological research, its title has always struck me as slightly sinister, as though it had been set up because someone somewhere felt that the masses needed to be kept under close observation otherwise who knows what they might get up to. "Spare Time" reflects Jennings' fascination with the everyday life of the Common Man. It was made in 1939, just before the outbreak of war, and details the leisure-time activities of three working-class communities, the steel workers of Sheffield, the cotton workers of Bolton and the miners of South Wales. Information is mostly conveyed through pictures alone; there is very little commentary. (What there is is provided by Laurie Lee, at the time working as a scriptwriter for the Film Unit but later to become famous as the author of "Cider with Rosie").

I must admit that I couldn't see what the point of this film was. The interest of old documentary films like these is generally the insights they give into social history, but the running-time of "Spare Time" is far too short to give a comprehensive picture of Britain's leisure habits in the thirties, and does little more than recycle a few clichés which were probably over-familiar even at the time. It has, for example, long been a widely-held view in Southern England that every working- class Northerner spends his leisure hours racing pigeons, breeding whippets or playing in a brass band, and the typical Englishman's mental picture of Wales includes the information that every self-respecting Welshman, and certainly every self-respecting Welsh miner, is a member of a male voice choir. (Or, as Flanders and Swann were to put it "He works underground with a lamp in his hat, And sings far too often, too loudly and flat").

There are a few striking visual images, but these are mostly of the industrial background to the film rather than of the leisure activities which are its subject. On the whole, however, this was not a film which told me anything I did not know already, and I doubt if it told people in 1939 anything they did not know already. Except that in Bolton jazz music was for some reason equated with a rendition of "Rule Britannia" on massed kazoos. Evidently recordings of Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman were in short supply in the record shops of the Lancashire cotton towns.

Spare Time is a great little film that shows a lot of little details about life in Britain in the late 1930s.

The film is narrated by the distinguished writer Laurie Lee (best known for Cider With Rosie) but he is only there to reflect on the meaning of spare time in general terms, and the film doesn't tell us what all the different activities taking place are, it simply shows them in elegant film clips.

The activities range from those still common today, to some traditional working-class pursuits that are now dying out, to the highly esoteric. People go cycling and watch sports, but there's also a lot of music making - from the colliery band to the millworkers' kazoo jazz band. There are also scenes of very serious-looking men drinking in a bar, and a pigeon fancier and a greyhound owner. Some sections flash by very quickly while others get a little more detail, particularly the kazooists parading with a woman dressed as Britannia.

Jennings focuses on three industries: a coal mine, steelworks, and a textile mill. Because only the third employs women, there's inevitably a focus on male leisure pursuits, but some of the activities of the women of the mill are shown, and there are details of children playing. But for those interested in women's social history, the film doesn't show a great deal of women's lives.

The documentary movement of the 1930s and the Mass Observation program both seemed to involve a new interest in documenting the lives of ordinary people, considering even the smallest detail of people's lives to be important. Sometimes you might get the impression that highly-educated middle-class people analysing working class lives might be patronising or even a tool of social control (and the Mass Observation movement did influence early market research and opinion polling in Britain) but Jennings is genuinely concerned with rendering the small, everyday facts of peoples lives and turning them into something truly poetic.

In contrast to Jennings' wartime surveys of the nation, such as Listen to Britain, there is no propagandist or overly patriotic aspect to the film. It is simply a collection of images of a nation at play, and fascinating and valuable because of that, as much as for its artistry.

Marvelously elusive war-time propaganda documentary that is both patriotic and mysterious. It is about the leisure activities of miners, steel-workers and cotton-mill employees, mostly musical.

The scene that annoyed the social realists at the time was the kazoo band of the millworkers, who play Rule Britannia and produce an elevated tableau of the Britannia figure with her shield and trident. It is almost André Kertész in its surrealism (Jennings was a member of the UK Surrrealist group). But the film is moving too in its trust in the people it presents, a trust tempered with strangeness, angularity and some kind of apprehension of darkness, as in the last shot of the miners descending in their cages. There is no war fever in it at all. It is almost the Blakean view of what it is to be English (I speak as a Hungarian...)