OTD in early British television: 16 July 1939
John Wyver writes: Noting ‘E.H.R.’s brief review in The Observer on Sunday 16 July 1939 of East End, a programme that was broadcast four days before, allows me both to preserve OTD-ness today while at the same time writing about a really interesting programme that I would have otherwise missed.
Of East End, the critic wrote that it was
an exploration of London’s slums and industrial areas, of which most of us know very little. It was a real gain to knowledge.
East End was a kind of follow-up to Soho, a ‘documentary’ made in the Alexandra Palace studio about which I wrote in April. Producer Andrew Miller Jones and journalist S.E. Reynolds made another attempt at bringing to AP characters from an area of London and presenting them, along with brief film sequences, in a succession of studio settings, a number of which were suggested visually by the penumbrascope. Silk weavers, upholsterers and other inhabitants were interviewed by Mass-Observation co-founder and polymath Tom Harrisson, who we have also met before in this blog.
James Jordan has written a fascinating essay about the programme (the full text of which is not available online), ‘”The most varied, confusing, colourful hubub in the world”: the East End, television and the documentary imagination, July 1939’, which was published in Migrant Britain: Histories and Historiographies: Essays in Honour of Colin Holmes, edited by Jennifer Craig-Norton, Christhard Hoffmann and Tony Kushner, and published by Routledge in 2018.
Jordan provides detailed context to the programme and its planning, and then works through the surviving camera script (there is no recording, of course). Do search out his article in a library, since the extracts I have space to reproduce here cannot do justice to its richness:
Broadcast live from Studio A, Alexandra Palace, at 9.20pm on 12 July 1939, East End required the use of four cameras (two tracking and two fixed) and two microphones (a boom and a stand microphone). It began with an in-vision caption that read simply ‘East End’, superimposed over a telecine sequence of ‘the river, smoking chimneys, ships unloading, dray horse, feet walking along pavement’. The first voice heard, coming through the monitor mike, was that of Harry Haynes, a docker for twenty years: ‘They say its streets are paved with gold’.
A switch to Camera 2 revealed the other side of the studio, a wallpaper set constructed to resemble a ‘room in [the] East End’ with a real kitchen range. In-vision was Mrs Green, an East End housewife described by Harrisson as the ‘motherly type’ and at the heart of what was to follow [although played by actress Dora Gregory]. She would lead Harrisson’s exploration, being the catalyst for discussion and presenting an insider’s voice to complement Harrisson’s outsider.
Following the structure of the synopsis, Harrisson began by defining the East End in geographical terms, with the use of a pointer and map. A second telecine sequence followed, showing the docks (‘the clearing house of Europe’), where ships came from ‘every nation’ although ‘the people who unload the ships are all one nation … the Cockney’.
Back in the studio Harrisson interviewed Harry Haynes, who was sitting astride a bollard in front of a penumbrascope screen onto which were projected shapes and shadows of the dockside’s derricks and cranes. Against this backdrop Haynes, representing the dockers and the Cockney ‘nation’, gave scripted answers to Harrison’s questions on the life of the casual docker, including the pleasures of an outdoor life and the daily struggle for work, while an in-vision map and pointer would highlight locations when mentioned.
Focussing on issues of race and immigration, Harrisson interviewed Lascar seaman turned pedlar San Wan Singh and ‘two Chinese’, Chung and Heng.
While the first half of the programme considered what might today be called economic migrants, the next considered those who had fled from persecution, a topic that was of contemporary interest but largely absent from the programme. Alexandra Palace had been used as a camp for Belgian and other refugees during the Great War, and the preceding months had seen Studio A broadcast a number of programmes which considered the modern refugee problem, but the majority the references here were rooted in the past.
Interviewees included silk weavers Harry Lucking and Kate Rolfe, referencing the French Huguenot refugees, and Jewish seamstress Rene Seghall, before moving to Basil Henriques and Wolf Michaels. According to Jordan, ‘Henriques was a regular broadcaster for the BBC and high-profile member of assimilated and anglicised Anglo-Jewry.’ Michaels was ‘an 18-year-old upholsterer in Curtain Road and member of the Bernhard Baron Settlement Boys Club run by Henriques.’ Others who appeared included a carpenter and a Cockney street trader from Petticoat Lane.
A handwritten addition to the camera script suggests that instead of an intended quote from Byron’s Don Juan , the final word went to Harrisson: ‘Though there is racial prejudice, poverty, pain,’ he said, ‘the EastEnders do lead a whole life. They face facts … side by side all sorts of job, the constraints of housing, malnutrition and congestions. Yet they get more out of it on the whole than any other people I’ve come across. The hallmark of the East End is its civility, its vitality, its tremendous interest in being alive.’
James Jordan concludes his article, which is to date one of only a very few detailed scholarly analyses of a pre-war broadcast, in this way:
As a television documentary, East End was as varied, colourful and confusing as the East End it depicted. As a summary of attitudes to ‘race’ and Britishness in Britain, it was similarly complicated, demonstrating how identities were being constructed from both within and without, simultaneously emphasising difference and a sense of belonging to the area. That is, in its production, construction and narrative sweep, while celebrating the cosmopolitan, it also highlighted that there were tensions and prejudices.
At times… it offered a view from above, and in this instance one that could control the meaning via still relatively new techniques as well as ‘casting’, but it also offered for the first time on television the chance to hear authentic voices of minority groups from within, at a point before the war changed attitudes and sensitivities. It was a programme not without its flaws and contradictions, but it was with hindsight a remarkable achievement for pre-war television.
Image: Petticoat Lane, c. 1920s, George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
[OTD post no. 211; part of a long-running series leading up to the publication of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain in January 2026.]
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