Humphrey Jennings

Humphrey Jennings studied at Pembroke College. The recorded working language is English. Places of work recorded in the authority are United Kingdom. Work by Humphrey Jennings is recorded in the collections of Tate, Museum of Modern Art, Israel Museum, Bolton Museum and Southampton City Art Gallery.

• Name — Humphrey Jennings • Birth Name — Frank Humphrey Sinkler Jennings • Born — 19 August 1907 • Birthplace — Walberswick, Suffolk, England • Died — 24 September 1950 (aged 43) • Place of death — Poros, Greece • Education — Pembroke College, Cambridge • Occupation — Documentary filmmaker • Known for — World War II film propaganda • Notable Works — Pandæmonium, 1660–1886

Born in Walberswick, Suffolk, Jennings was the son of Guild Socialists, an architect father and a painter mother. He was educated at the Perse School and later read English at Pembroke College, Cambridge. When not studying, he painted and created advanced stage designs and was the founder-editor of Experiment in collaboration with William Empson and Jacob Bronowski. After graduating with a starred First-Class degree in English, Jennings undertook post-graduate research on the poet Thomas Gray, under the supervision of a predominantly absent I. A. Richards, who was teaching abroad. After abandoning what looked like a successful academic career, Jennings undertook several jobs, including photographer, painter, and theatre designer. He joined the GPO Film Unit, then under John Grierson, in 1934, largely it is thought because Jennings needed the income after the birth of his first daughter rather than from a strong interest in filmmaking. Relations with his colleagues were difficult; they saw him as a dilettante, but he did form a friendship with Alberto Cavalcanti. In 1936, Jennings helped the organisation of the 1936 Surrealist Exhibition in London, in association with André Breton, Roland Penrose, and Herbert Read. It was at about this time that Jennings, along with Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, helped to found Mass Observation and co-edited with Madge the text May the Twelfth, a montage of extracts from observer reports of the 1937 coronation of George VI and Elizabeth for Mass Observation. A fiftieth-anniversary edition of this text was published in 1987 by Faber. In 1938, he edited an issue of the London Bulletin which included a "collection of texts on the Impact of the Machine," and he used this material to prepare a series of talks to miners in the Swansea Valley while making The Silent Village several years later. This prompted him to add more material, and he obtained a contract from Routledge to prepare it for publication as a book; he worked on it fitfully and thought it was almost ready just before his death. His daughter, Mary-Louise, asked Charles Madge to assist in finally editing it for publication in 1985 as Pandaemonium, 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers. The book was cited by writer Frank Cottrell Boyce as an influence in the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony, with an early section of the ceremony named after it.

In 1940, the GPO Film Unit became the Crown Film Unit, a film-making propaganda arm of the Ministry of Information, and Jennings joined the new organisation. Jennings' only feature-length film, the 70-minute Fires Were Started (1943), also known as I Was A Fireman, details the work of the Auxiliary Fire Service in London. It blurs the lines between fiction and documentary because the scenes are re-enactments. This film, which uses techniques such as montage, is considered one of the classics of the genre. His films are otherwise shorts, inclusively patriotic in sentiment and very British in their sensibility, such as: Spare Time (1939), London Can Take It! (1940), Words for Battle (1941), A Diary for Timothy (with a narration written by E. M. Forster, 1945), The Dim Little Island (1948) and Family Portrait (his last completed film, which tells of the Festival of Britain, 1950). Co-directed with Stewart McAllister, Jennings's best remembered short film is Listen to Britain (1942). Excerpts are often seen in other documentaries, especially portions of one of the concerts given by Dame Myra Hess in the National Gallery while its collection was evacuated for safe-keeping.

Jennings married Cicely Cooper in 1929. The couple had two daughters, Mary-Lou and Charlotte. In the 1930s, he was also associated with the American writer Emily Coleman and the heiress Peggy Guggenheim. He died in Poros, Greece, in a fall on the cliffs of the Greek island while scouting locations for a film on post-war healthcare in Europe.

• Post-Haste (1934) • Locomotives (1934) • The Story of the Wheel (1934) • Farewell Topsails (1937) • Penny Journey (1938) • Speaking from America (1938) • The Farm (1938) • English Harvest (1938) • Making Fashion (1938) • Spare Time (1939) • SS Ionian (1939, a.k.a. Cargoes) • The First Days (1939) • Spring Offensive (1940) • Welfare of the Workers (1940) • London Can Take It! (1940, a.k.a. Britain Can Take It!) • The Heart of Britain (1941, a.k.a. This Is England) • Words for Battle (1941) • Listen to Britain (co-director 1942) • Fires Were Started (1943, a.k.a. I Was A Fireman) • The Silent Village (1943) • The True Story of Lili Marlene (1944) • The Eighty Days (1944, a.k.a. V. 1) • Myra Hess (1945) • A Diary for Timothy (1945) • A Defeated People (1946) • The Cumberland Story (1947) • The Dim Little Island (1949) • Family Portrait (1950) • The Good Life (completed by Graham Wallace 1951)

• Pett and Pott: A Fairy Story of the Suburbs (dir. Alberto Cavalcanti, 1934) • The Birth of the Robot (dir. Len Lye, 1936)