Early Life and Career
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 in the poet Thomas Gray, under the supervision of a predominantly absent I. A. Richards, who was teaching abroad. After abandoning what looked like being a successful academic career, Jennings undertook a number of jobs including photographer, painter and theatre designer. He joined 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 film. Relations with his colleagues were difficult, they saw him as something of a dilettante, but he did form a friendship with Alberto Cavalcanti.
In 1936, Jennings helped with 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 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 King George VI and Queen 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. This prompted him to add more material and he obtained a contract from Routledge to work it up 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 Cotrell Boyce as an influence in the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony with an early section of the ceremony named after it.
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