Humphrey Jennings - The War Years

The War Years

The GPO Film Unit became the Crown Film Unit in 1940, a movie-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 English 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' 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. 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, and is buried in Athens.