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Picturing Home Domestic life and Modernity in 1940s British Film
Hollie Price
Studies in Popular Culture Manchester: University Press, 2021 Hardcover. xiv + 242 p. ISBN 978-1526138200. £80
Reviewed by Pat Thane Birkbeck
College London The suburbs which expanded in England
between the wars and after World War 2 housed mainly the growing numbers of the
lower middle- and skilled working-classes who could afford to buy a modest but
comfortable home and escape the overcrowded, grimy, polluted cities. They were
long disparaged by intellectuals as arid, culture-free deserts, homes of the
‘middlebrow’, ‘neither one thing nor the other’ as Virginia Woolf put it,
therefore worthless. Price presents a more interesting and
original analysis of suburbs as represented in what were certainly
‘middlebrow’, films, literature, magazines and other sources in the 1930s and
40s, mostly also despised by intellectuals but indicating their significance in
the politics and culture of the time. For many people between the wars,
including housing and urban reformers and less condescending intellectuals like
J.B. Priestley, suburbs with houses providing clean, adequate space for
comfortable living, gardens, well-equipped kitchens and bathrooms represented
the modernised future, ending the century-long, uncontrolled sprawl of cities
and the slums they created. They were eagerly embraced by the growing numbers
who could afford them. During World War 2 suburban housing was among the many
social reforms proposed for the better, more socially equal, post-war world,
the ‘New Jerusalem’, that was widely aspired to. After 1945 among the many
social welfare measures introduced by the Labour government were thousands of
publicly-owned council houses rented to working people who could not afford to
buy, providing similar comforts and gardens in what were in effect new suburbs
known as ‘council estates’. Labour also initiated New Towns, building whole
towns on the suburban model, with factories and other businesses providing
work, enabling residents to escape the cost and stress of commuting into cities
and further restraining urban sprawl. The book surveys how
wartime and post-war films, in particular, supported and promoted these reforms,
showing the contrast between suburban and urban living, especially for
working-class people, inspiring viewers with images of furnishing and design
for comfortable domesticity. Price compares these representations with those in
the 1930s and 40s in the radical popular magazine, Picture Post, in the
burgeoning range of glossy women’s magazines, the increasingly pervasive
advertisements for consumer goods, as colour photography was transformed, and
displays at the popular annual Ideal Home exhibition which first opened in
London in 1908, was suspended during the war, reopening in 1947 and every year
since. The first film
considered is Love on the Dole (1941) based on a popular 1930s novel
about the impact of unemployment on a working-class family in Northern industrial
Salford. Its images of respectable people trying to live a comfortable life in
an over-crowded home with little outdoor space in a small back yard, like many
working people washing in a tin bath in front of a smoky coal fire in the
absence of a bathroom, challenged disparaging notions of unemployed people as irresponsible
burdens on the taxpayer. They struggled to survive unemployment, selling off
their possessions and short of food. The film presents them as people who
deserved the much better suburban environment shown at the end of the film, the
‘New Britain’ called for in the closing title. It also displayed their wider
urban environment as one of community support among neighbours, suggesting, as
some social researchers did at the time, that not everything in the
working-class urban environment should be abandoned in pursuit of modernisation:
the suburbs tended to encourage privatised living and would gain from adopting
urban practices of community; the new world would benefit from learning from
the old. It Always Rains on
Sunday (1947)
showed that still after the war in East London respectable working people built
the best lives they could in cramped homes with few facilities in a supportive
neighbourhood with congenial street markets, but one struggling to survive in
an area damaged by the wartime blitz and needing reconstruction and reform.
Picture Post published similar post-war images of East London to support
demands for reform, while also regretting the positive side of local life that
might disappear with rehousing, again unwilling to abandon positive features of
the old life especially communal interaction which seemed absent from privatised
suburbs. Other wartime and
post-war films were set in suburbs, presenting a positive image, though with
some negativities, especially for women. Two films, This Happy Breed (1944)
and The Captive Heart (1946) are discussed, each stressing images of
bright, airy, well-designed homes with gardens close to the countryside, decorated
internally in colours evoking the pastoral environment displaying their
modernity but, again, seeking to retain desirable features of the past with houses
represented with cottage-style nostalgia, their furnishings combining fine older
as well as modern items. The films present this continuity between old and new as
important for sustaining national identity – too much post-war change could be
culturally disruptive. Before, during and after the war the English countryside
was widely seen as representing Englishness and the suburbs were presented as quintessentially
English. Picture Post and other media also promoted this idea, including
by encouraging the English pastime of gardening as a suburban pursuit with the
potential to encourage community building through gardening clubs among other
activities. This Happy Breed conveys this suburban vision with the story
of a family moving into a new home in a south London suburb in the 1930s. The
Captive Heart is set very differently in a German prison camp. These ideal,
pastoral modern settings feature in the prisoners’ dreams of home. Spring in Park Lane (1948) was
one of several post-war films presenting glamorous homes, ’dream
palaces’, offering audiences escape from austerity with images of interiors of
Georgian elegance and grandeur. It was another example, echoed in magazines and
Ideal Home Exhibitions, of the desire to encourage retention of features of the
past in modernised environments. Meanwhile, the homes of film stars, including
Gracie Fields and Flora Robson, were presented as examples of successful,
comfortable, more unassuming blending of old and new design. The orderly
domestic lifestyles of star couples in such settings, including Michael
Redgrave and his wife Rachel Kempson, were presented as attainable ideals –
even glamorous people could live with ordinary domesticity available to all. But
some films suggested that domestic companionship could not always be sustained.
In The Glass Mountain (1949) the husband found it hard to return to previous
comfortable domesticity after war service and went off with an Italian woman he
had met during the war. This represented the difficulties of adjusting to
post-war life experienced by many couples. It was one of a succession of films
suggesting that suburban domestic life was not always idyllic but could be a
site of emotional problems, not only due to the return of servicemen Price describes how these
accounts challenged an inter-war trend of presenting another virtue of the
modern home as producing psychological well-being amid rural calm, at a time
when psychology and psychoanalysis were developing in scale and influence. However
their presence also increased awareness of the tensions and insecurities that
could arise in domestic settings. In the 1930s ads for tonics, tablets and books
on psychology offered help with feelings of depression connected to the home,
especially for women. This became a subject of ‘middlebrow’ interwar novels,
including those of Rosamond Lehmann, and of stories in women’s magazines. They
described how women, spending too much time alone while their husbands worked,
might dream of escape. Price provides the film Brief Encounter (1945) as
another example. This centres on a middle-class housewife and mother and her
short-lived affair with a doctor met at a train station. It focusses on her
dreams of romance as escape from her day-to-day existence, similar to the
stories of the novels. She confesses to her husband in the domestic
surroundings of their semi-rural home and they are reconciled; the ideal of
companionate marriage wins. Critics condemned it as women’s magazine fiction
but it was popular. The home is represented as typically suburban, ‘solid,
comfortable-looking’ with modern appliances, but also a prison in which she
feels trapped, as she dreams of life outside with her lover. Price discusses
how this tension experienced by suburban wives was discussed by women’s
magazines in the 1930s which offered advice on home-making, family lives,
domestic chores and on how women could escape from them by developing an inner
life with other fulfilling interests, exploring what it meant to be a modern
woman. The book provides an
unusual, convincing account of English suburban life placed in the culture of
the 1930s and 40s with some depth and complexity, challenging popular, hostile
stereotypes. Influential media presented the suburbs positively as combining
the pleasures of town and country, providing leisurely lives in clean, fresh,
well-equipped homes which were represented as conveying modern ideals of social
reform, national identity, comfort and citizenship, but not without problems
especially for women. Price explores a range of sources to create this account
but her particular contribution is to stress the contribution of cinema to
perceptions and models of English domestic life and modernity in the
mid-twentieth century and the real, but far from total, improvements brought by
post-war reforms. At times the book slips into the jargon of cultural studies
which can be hard to comprehend, but in general it provides real, convincing
insights into experiences and perceptions of English suburban living during its
period of greatest expansion.
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