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Melodrama, Self, and Nation in
Post-War British Popular Film

This book investigates the portrayal of nationalities and sexualities in

British post-Second World War crime film and melodrama. By focussing
on these genres, and looking at the concept of melodrama as an analyti-
cal tool apt for the analysis of both sexuality and nation, the book offers
insight into the desires, fears, and anxieties of post-war culture. The
problem of returning to ‘normalcy’ after the war is one of the recurring
themes discussed; alienation from society, family, and the self were cen-
tral issues for both women and men in the post-war years, and the book
examines the anxieties surrounding these social changes in the films of
the period. In particular, it explores heterosexuality and nationality as
some of the most prominent frameworks for the construction of identi-
ties in our time, structures that, for all their centrality, are made invisible
in our culture.

Johanna Laitila received her PhD at the University of St Andrews School

of English, and she has taught Film, Media, and Popular Culture at the
University of Dundee.
Routledge Advances in Film Studies

51 The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema

Christian Quendler

52 Surveillance in Asian Cinema

Under Eastern Eyes
Edited by Karen Fang

53 US Youth Films and Popular Music

Identity, Genre, and Musical Agency
Tim McNelis

54 The Cinematic Eighteenth Century

History, Culture, and Adaptation
Edited by Srividhya Swaminathan and Steven W. Thomas

55 The Contemporary Femme Fatale

Gender, Genre and American Cinema
Katherine Farrimond

56 Film Comedy and the American Dream

Zach Sands

57 Ecocinema and the City

Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann

58 Collective Trauma and the Psychology of Secrets in

Transnational Film
Deborah Lynn Porter

59 Melodrama, Self, and Nation in Post-War British Popular Film

Johanna Laitila

For a full list of titles published in the series, please visit www.­routledge.com.
Melodrama, Self, and
Nation in Post-War British
Popular Film

Johanna Laitila
First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of Johanna Laitila to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
CIP data has been applied for.

ISBN: 978-1-138-48275-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-351-05658-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
For Jukka
Contents

Acknowledgements ix

1 Introduction 1
History and Myth 1
‘Bloody Uncomfortable’: From War to Post-War 4
Inside, Outside, and Somewhere In-Between:
Race and Sexuality 12
Melodramas in the Post-War 16
Identities and Their Theories 20

2 Amnesia and Awakening in Four Melodramas 27

‘Lest We Forget’: National Memories and
Collective Oblivions 27
Male Amnesiacs in Caravan and The October Man 30
Displaced Trauma in Madonna of the Seven Moons
and The Seventh Veil 46

3 Post-War Imaginings of Time and Space 70

‘We’ll Need Good Citizens When This Is Over’ 70
Masculine Horror and Feminine Melancholy in
Post-War Ealing: Dead of Night and It Always
Rains on Sunday 74
Rebelling against Normative Temporality in The
Wicked Lady and A Matter of Life and Death 94

4 Subjects, Signors, and Signoras: Naming and Interpellation 117

Language and Identity 117
Pathological Families and Nationalisms in
The Blue Lamp and Odd Man Out 119
Making Names in The Long Memory and
The Magic Bow 134
viii Contents
5 Conclusions 149

Bibliography 151
Filmography 181
Index 191
Acknowledgements

This book has developed from my research at the University of St

­A ndrews, and I am, first of all, grateful to the community at the School
of English that has offered me a space to grow in over the years. I owe
a deep debt of gratitude to my supervisor, Gill Plain, for her encour-
agement and inspiration, for initially introducing me to the wonderful
world of Gainsborough melodrama, and for the series of delightful dis-
cussions on British post-war film that we have since had. She has been a
great influence on my thinking and has become a friend in the process. I
would also like to thank the University of St Andrews 600th Fellowship
and the Finnish Concordia Fund Scholarship that funded the research
done for this book.
I am grateful for the conversations with friends and colleagues that
have helped me shape my ideas for this book as well as for the inspir-
ing dialogue with fellow participants at the interdisciplinary conferences
held at Stirling and Oxford where early versions of Chapters 1 and 2 were
first presented. Special thanks to Nadine Jassat for her enthusiasm for
my work and Lucy Hall for our James Mason discussions. Thanks are
also due to Andrew Murphy, Elisabetta Girelli, and John David Rhodes
for offering their valuable insight, which has, no doubt, improved this
final book, and to all those other people who have read sections of
the book and given their feedback, including the three reviewers for
­Routledge who offered their suggestions on a sample of the manuscript.
I am grateful to Felisa Salvago-Keyes at Routledge for taking on this
book and to Christina Kowalski and Sofia Buono and her team for their
help during the manuscript process. Thanks also to Massimo Moretti at
Studio ­Canal for his kind collaboration with image copyrights.
Finally, my thanks go to my parents, who have given me their unwav-
ering support, and to Jukka, who moved his life with me to the east coast
of Scotland and stood by me through it all.
1 Introduction

History and Myth

This project originally commenced in September 2013 in St Andrews,
Scotland, on the week that marked the beginning of the one-year count-
down to the Scottish independence referendum. The following year, on
18 September 2014, the referendum attracted an 84.6 per cent ­turnout
at the polls, the highest in the UK since the introduction of univer-
sal suffrage, as 55.3 per cent of the Scottish electorate voted ‘No’ to
­independence (BBC News 2015, ‘Scotland Decides’). Yet another his-
torical referendum was held in June 2016 as Britain voted to leave the
European Union (EU). The ‘Brexit’ negotiations led by the new prime
minister, Theresa May, have since proven difficult, and Britain’s role in
the ­European community will likely be in transition for years to come
after its official withdrawal from the EU, which is expected to take place
in 2019. Meanwhile, following the referendum, many Scottish National
Party (SNP) supporters are pushing for a second independence vote in
Scotland.
Aside from these recent, transformative debates, the discussion on
equal marriage laws in Scotland was given considerable press attention
in 2013 and 2014, and the Marriage and Civil Partnership Bill was even-
tually passed by the parliament and granted royal assent in February
2014. The borders of nationality and citizenship – as well as their gen-
dered manifestations – have thus been actively negotiated in the recent
past, and the notion of a changing Britain is currently as tangible as ever.
In the autumn of 2013, the upcoming independence referendum caused
quite the stir among the English, Irish, and Welsh Scotland-dwellers I
know, a number of whom seemed slightly baffled to be granted a vote
on the basis of residency. One such Englishman remarked how he really
felt more ‘British’ than ‘English’ in his everyday life – save the occa-
sional ­incident of being clad in a cricket uniform, he remarked with
sarcasm. That same week, a Scottish gentleman stopped me on the street
to discuss the referendum – an invitation to national political discourse
par excellence. While purely anecdotal, such examples demonstrate how
passionate, humorous, and often self-ironic the British can be about
2 Introduction
their nation(s) and national identities. As Ernest Barker puts it, ‘We have
a steady national habit of grumbling at ourselves and everything which
is ours; but there is a smile behind the grumble’ (1948: 81). Such anec-
dotes moreover go to show how the discourses of politics and mundane
experience negotiate and reproduce nationalities in our daily lives.
It seems impossible to write about nationalities without some degree
of passion, and British nationalities are no exception. If anything, the
complex relations of the different nations within the UK make ‘nation’
and ‘nationality’ particularly problematic concepts in the British ­context,
without even thinking on the scale of the British C ­ ommonwealth. While
this book does not attempt to address the national inclusions and ex-
clusions contained within Britishness per se, nor to analyse the distinct
English, Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Irish nationalisms or national-
ities, the unstable internal divisions within Britain should, nonethe-
less, always be a starting point when writing about ‘British’ film. Any
­attempts at neutrality, in critical or cinematic explorations, often equate
­‘Englishness’ with ‘Britishness’, thus proving anything but neutral. I will
return to the debates around nationalities later in this Introduction, but
a brief personal disclaimer is in order here. As a Finnish citizen who has
lived in Scotland for several years, I am approaching the issue of British
nationalities from the point of view of a partial outsider, which lends it-
self to the prerequisite of ‘confession’ urged by the theorist of nationality
Michael Billig (1995: 95). That is, I am not approaching British cinema
and ­Britishness as a voyeur but as a British cinema enthusiast as well
as a curious observer of, and participant in, British culture. Tackling
such a topic as an ‘outsider’ has its obvious limitations as well as certain
benefits. For instance for Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘outsideness is a most pow-
erful factor in understanding’ within the cultural sphere (1986: 7). Even
though I may not fully agree with Bakhtin’s claim, I am nevertheless
hoping that the benefits of my partial outsider position will balance out
its inevitable shortcomings here and allow for some unexpected theo-
retical intersections. In fact, the distinction between an outsider and an
insider is, of course, an inevitably slim one within the realm of nation-
alities, and, as Benedict Anderson writes, ‘the nation presents itself as
simultaneously open and closed’ (2006: 146).
This book examines the parallel reproduction of nationalities and sex-
ualities in British popular films, crime and melodrama more specifically,
during what is one of the most written about eras in British and Western
history: the last half of the 1940s and the first years of the 1950s. This
book presents a text-oriented, interdisciplinary approach, and, to allow
sufficient space for the extensive analysis of individual films as primary
texts, the main emphasis is further narrowed down to films made in the
years 1945–48, with a few primary films made in the early years of the
1950s in the final chapter. With the lack of an auteur tradition in British
cinema, focussing on a narrower time span seems more useful in order
 Introduction 3
to examine thematic and aesthetic patterns in this type of text-oriented
research and to add to the extensive body of research on British cinema
of the period.
As the Filmography in this book suggests, the films made during this
period offer a plethora of material to investigate, and the selection of
films for the book was by no means easy. However, the films chosen
for close analysis offer particularly fascinating parallels and contrasts in
their presentations of nationalities and sexualities, and open up possibil-
ities for viewing ‘against the grain’, which merits further examination.
The selection of films is moreover informed by the, often uneasy, inter-
action of realistic and melodramatic elements in the films. I am equally
interested in films in which nationality and sexuality are overt concerns
and those in which questions of identity are disguised – often in the
flamboyant costumes of melodrama. The aim here is not to name nation
and heterosexuality as ‘roots of all evil’, to borrow the name of a 1947
Gainsborough film, but to explore how nationalities and sexualities are
presented as fragile in the films of the period. Further, this book draws
from films across the artistic spectrum, and its aim is not to assess films
or genres according to their presentations of gender and nation as ‘pos-
itive’ or ‘negative’ – nor to place them along a transgressive/regressive
divide or celebrate or dismiss films, authors, or studios according to such
qualities – but to pay attention to the often conflicting explorations of
identity and desire in popular films.
Each chapter in this book contributes to a core argument concerning
the parallel trajectories of nationalities and sexualities in these films.
Chapter 2 explores amnesia and awakening in four melodramas, explor-
ing how the depictions of psychological ailment differ along gendered
lines. I will, first, look at examples of male amnesiacs in Caravan (1946)
and The October Man (1947), and, second, look at examples of female
amnesiacs in Madonna of the Seven Moons (1945) and The Seventh
Veil (1945). This chapter investigates the significance of both individual
and collective remembering and forgetting in the construction of the
nation and individual identities. These films are particularly resonant of
the post-war period in that forgetting the self, and the national past, is
simultaneously elating and tragic.
Chapter 3 looks at presentations of time and space in post-war films
and relates temporality to the construction of ‘queer villains’ in A
­M atter of Life and Death (1946) and The Wicked Lady (1945). It also
investigates how implications of sexual ‘deviancy’ were connected to
non-futurity in post-war cultural imagination and analyses portrayals of
conflicted temporality in two Ealing films: It Always Rains on Sunday
(1947) and Dead of Night (1945). In the films discussed in this chapter,
even when hope for the future does exist, there is a forceful under-
current of lamentation and, often, trauma, as seen in particular in the
case of Dead of Night (1945) and A Matter of Life and Death (1946).
4 Introduction
The first half of this chapter analyses the acute sense of entrapment
within a traumatic, queer temporality in Dead of Night and the con-
flict between national and personal temporality in It Always Rains on
Sunday (1947). The other half of the chapter focusses on the temporal
structures and the framework of futurism in The Wicked Lady (1945)
and A Matter of Life and Death.
Finally, Chapter 4 explores the trope of naming in the cinema of the
period by taking two films of the early 1950s, The Blue Lamp (1950)
and The Long Memory (1953), to build a comparison with the late-
1940s films that dominate the discussion in this book – the chapter will
show that the concerns with gender, sexuality, and nationality explored
in films of the immediate post-war period remain relevant as the decade
changes and war fades further into the past. In addition to these films,
this final chapter looks at uneasy social ‘calls’ and the presentations of
women as distorted mirrors for male national subjects in Odd Man Out
(1947) and The Magic Bow (1946). The problematic of reconstructing
the family and renegotiating gender roles and national and sexual iden-
tities is a significant feature of these films, even though only The Blue
Lamp explicitly names social issues arising from the post-war situation
as its topic.
First, though, it is necessary briefly to consider both the volatile his-
torical events in Britain that form a backdrop to the films analysed in
this book, and the concerns with melodrama, crime, and genre, before
tackling some rather awkward terminological definitions within the
realm of nationalities, sexualities, and their theories.

‘Bloody Uncomfortable’: From War to Post-War

The Second World War commenced on 3 September 1939 and ended in
Europe on VE (Victory in Europe) Day, 8 May 1945, and in Japan in
­August 1945, after the atomic bombs were released by the United States
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The origins and consequences of wars are
often widely debated, which is notoriously the case with the Second
World War.1 It was a conflict of vast, indeed catastrophic, impact, and
it thus rightly generated the widespread use of terms such as ‘total war’
and ‘People’s War’ in Britain. The new language sought to depict the
massive extent of national mobilisation and the effects of the war on ci-
vilians due to rationing; shortages; disruptions caused by the bombing of
cities, blackouts, and evacuations; and the emotional strain of air raids,
cold, separation, fear of death, and invasion during the Blitz.
The role of propaganda in the Second World War was unprecedented
in military history, both in the UK and internationally. 2 In Britain,
the wartime Ministry of Information (MoI), initially set up to manage
state propaganda during the First World War, was re-established after the
­Second World War broke out. During the first years of the war especially,
 Introduction 5
the state of public morale was observed by MoI, and more specifically its
Home Intelligence Division, as Mackay posits, ‘in an almost obsessional
way, taking the public’s pulse by what it thought, felt and said’ (2002: 1).
The MoI also commissioned Mass-Observation, an independent social
research group, to observe and record the status and shifts in civilian
morale (Mackay 2002: 1).3 The most famous propaganda victory of the
wartime British coalition government followed the events in Dunkirk in
the summer of 1940 (26 May–4 June), with the military defeat presented
to the public as the ‘Dunkirk spirit’, a term that sought to encapsulate
the ideal of British grit. Winston Churchill as prime minister played a
significant part in wartime state propaganda. In his speech in front of the
Bradford Town Hall in December 1942, Churchill stated,

All are united like one great family; all are standing together, help-
ing each other, taking their share and doing their work, some at the
front, some under the sea or on the sea in all weathers, some in the
air, some in the coal mines, great numbers in the shops, some in
the homes – all doing their bit.
(Charles Eade (ed.) 1943: 245)

Churchill’s speech resonates with the People’s War ideology, which por-
trayed the nation as a ‘family’ – in a popular nationalist image – and
emphasised the importance of everyone ‘doing their bit’. The nation, in
this light, is something of a fiction, created in part through speech and
rhetoric, in particular in wartime.4
The Second World War propaganda machine in Britain also extended
to the silver screen, and the war had a profound impact on British film
production as well as British ‘national’ cinema. In addition to monitor-
ing the national atmosphere, the MoI, together with the British Board
of Film Censors (BBFC), had an interest in cinema as an art form, with
a particular focus on the documentary realist genre, in their endeavours
to manipulate public morale and morals. The Films Division of the MoI
funded both documentaries and feature films, and thus had a direct in-
volvement in the making of films. Directors such as Carol Reed, David
Lean, and Humphrey Jennings were associated with the documentary
realist genre, which dominated film production in the early years of the
war, while Ealing Studios’ Michael Balcon, as a producer, is often seen
best to epitomise wartime collaboration between film as art, on the one
hand, and propaganda, on the other. For instance Sue Harper has a­ rgued
that, during the war years, Balcon was ‘the producer most in sympathy
with government aims’ (1996: 201). Films produced by Balcon in the
years of the war, such as The Next of Kin (Thorold Dickinson 1942) and
Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti 1942), support such claims;
these films promote values of national loyalty and unity, and punish
treachery in their narratives.
6 Introduction
Cinema, rather than literature, was consequently the dominant artis-
tic medium of the Second World War, and it was not only the MoI that
was inspired by British cinema in the 1940s: cinema attendance was
high both during and immediately after the war. The quality of British
cinema is also thought to have peaked in the period, which is often cited
as ‘a golden age of British cinema’ (Richards and Sheridan 1987: 13). 5
The emergence of a British ‘national’ cinematic style did not, however,
occur without growing pains. Arguably British cinema is an outsider
in itself, existing in what seems to be a constant inferiority complex in
the daunting shadow of its big brother Hollywood, making it an ‘other’
cinema by definition.
Inevitably, in discussions of British film, Hollywood and the American
film industry have been constant points of comparison. Towards the end
of the Second World War discussions around Hollywood cinema inter-
mingled with general feelings of anti-Americanism. In a June 1945 issue
of the popular British film magazine Picturegoer, actress Phyllis Calvert
analyses the comparisons between British and American cinema rather
well when asked what she wants for British film:

I want to see British films judged fairly. At the moment, there is a

tendency to compare our films with American films without consid-
ering the very different circumstances under which they are made.
In America itself, the people do not have to make films with out-of-
date equipment, short supplies and under conditions such as we have
experienced in this country during these war years.
(23 June 1945: 6)

One of the recurring topics of debate has been the relative star power of
domestic stars in comparison to Hollywood’s, debatably much shinier,
ones. The discussion, perhaps unsurprisingly, always seems to be centred
on female stars in particular, and during 1945, the last year of the war,
the star power of British actresses seemed to be a hot topic on the pages
of Picturegoer. In a July 1945 issue, for instance, columnist P. J. Dyer
presents the provocative article ‘To Find a Star’, which dismisses the
plain charms of Britain’s favourite film stars – Phyllis Calvert, ­Margaret
Lockwood, Deborah Kerr, and Patricia Roc – in favour of American ones
(21 July 1945: 6–7). In his article, Dyer collaborates with an ­A merican
serviceman to muse, ‘What do the American Servicemen in this coun-
try think of our actresses?’ (7). In the same issue, the editor concern-
edly asks, ‘Have we no Lauren Bacalls?’ (21 July 1945: 3). Later in the
year, July’s star issue caused an outrage among the P ­ icturegoer readers,
who flooded the magazine’s ‘Letters from Our Readers’ ­section in the
15 September issue (14). In the same issue, a response from ­Margaret
Lockwood – appropriately entitled ‘Margaret Lockwood is Furious!’ –
is released. The column delivers what the title promises as the ‘furi-
ous’ Lockwood writes, ‘It’s not only on my own behalf I’m furious.
 Introduction 7
I’m furious at the casually slighting way our most popular girls have
been treated’ (Picturegoer 15 September 1945: 3).6 These references to
rivalry in relation to American cinema and Hollywood stars may, of
course, seem painfully trivial in light of the devastating purging of ‘out-
siders’ that was systematically taking place in Europe, and Germany
in particular, during the war. Such debates, however, are revealing in
terms of the newly emerging British cinema tradition and as an example
of escapism provided by popular culture in such bleak times.
As the war progressed, there was a gradual orientation away from
the war in both public discussions and on the screen. 1942 can be seen
to mark a turning point as people were increasingly reluctant to engage
with the current conflict. Several visions of post-war British society were
imagined in the mid-war years, and the most influential of these was
the 1942 Beveridge Report, which presented a plan for social restructur-
ing, including universal healthcare – a plan later executed by Clement
Attlee’s Labour government, elected to power in 1945. In the last years
of the war, however, such hopes were intertwined with present miser-
ies. On the home front, the trials of the Blitz and the years towards the
end of the war differed greatly. ‘The Little Blitz’ of 1944 again brought
the immediate threat of bombings and the devastation of total war to
­London, yet for most, the end of the war was a waiting game.
The heated debates on British stardom in comparison to Hollywood
on the pages of Picturegoer in these final years of the war attest to a trend
of escapism. The shift away from war films and the ‘People’s War’ ide-
ology is extravagantly demonstrated by the Gainsborough melodrama
cycle, to which, instead of the realism of Ealing, ‘the public turned for
solace in the last years of the war’ (Richards and Sheridan 1987: 15). Yet
the escapism provided by melodrama was not just to do with a collec-
tive yearning for a temporary exit from the direct impact of war: it was
equally concerned with evading the, often confusing and contradictory,
1940s gender roles and expectations.
The period from the late 1940s to the early 1950s seems to be one
during which gender, sexuality, and nationhood collided in a bundle of
collective identity crises. Undeniably, masculinity and femininity, as well
as the family unit, were in flux in the era. During the war, families were
separated for often long periods of time due to men’s absence in war as
well as through evacuation that often separated families. ­People’s do-
mestic and sexual lives were in some degree of chaos, and the statistics
are revealing: during the war, illegitimacy doubled, and there was a 150
per cent increase in the divorce rate and a 139 per cent rise in venereal
disease (Weight 2002: 77). These statistics suggest at least a temporary
shift in sexual morals – or at any rate sexual behaviour – as well as
changes in family values. The wartime transformation of women’s roles
and status was particularly dramatic. Whereas before the start of the
war, women’s domain was, to a great extent, seen to be in the home, by
1943 all women between the ages 16 and 50 were expected to register
8 Introduction
for war work (Calder 1992: 383). The extensive participation of women
in such work meant taking on roles outside the home in stereotypically
‘masculine’ spheres of work. Yet propaganda and women’s magazines
alike reminded citizens that ‘regardless of what it was women were do-
ing during the war, their femininity would survive’ and that ‘love and
marriage would follow wartime service and sacrifice’ (Rose 2003: 128).
Women’s entry into the public sphere was therefore portrayed as a tem-
porary necessity and sacrifice that women were expected to endure rather
than enjoy. These changing wartime expectations of women, the contra-
diction of taking on masculine duties while simultaneously maintaining
their beauty and ‘essential’ femininity, are reflected in the overwhelming
number of beauty advertisements on the pages of Picturegoer in the mid-
1940s. Especially in the last years of the war, advertisers were keen to ap-
peal to women’s ‘feminine’ duties towards their men. A Snowfire makeup
advertisement introduces ‘Margaret [who] is essentially a man’s girl. She
likes the drinks that men like; she appreciates good cooking and the
finer points of most sports’. Yet ‘she is never separated from her ­Snowfire
Beauty Makers, she is always good to look at’ (Picturegoer 12 May 1945:
16). ­Meanwhile, a deodorant advertisement in a June issue shows three
uniformed women with the text ‘When you get back into Civvies! You’ll
still need Odo-Ro-No cream deodorant’ (Picturegoer 9 June 1945: 16).
­Cutex hand cream further promises to ‘keep busy hands young and
lovely’ ­(Picturegoer 7 July 1945: 16), while a soap advertisement reads,
‘Will he find you as young and lovely when he comes home again? Eve
toilet soap […] keeps your complexion radiantly youthful… for him!’
(Picturegoer 22 July 1944: 16, my emphasis). In another issue, a lipstick
advertisement with a blonde woman holding a returning soldier’s arm
appeals, ‘You’re his Dream Girl [sic]… Don’t disappoint him […] give
yourself [a] new look’ (Picturegoer 1 September 1945: 2). What these
advertisements insist on, in no uncertain terms, is that being temporarily
dressed like a man and working in men’s jobs – or indeed even enjoying
some ‘masculine’ activities, such as sports, as ‘Margaret’ in the Snowfire
advertisement does – was no excuse to look like a man, to smell like a
man, or to behave like a man. It certainly was, furthermore, no excuse to
neglect duties at home, which is hinted at in the Squander Bug character
that frequents the Picturegoer advertisements section as well as propa-
ganda posters, urging people, and women in particular, to save money
and to abstain from excessive spending.7 The public discourse towards
the end of the war, then, sought to steer women back into the domestic
sphere as well as back into a greater degree of dependency on men.
In these beauty advertisements, the domestic and the political curi-
ously intermingle. Whereas the tone of the advertisements is light, and
to the contemporary reader simultaneously comic and disturbing, the
propaganda posters targeted at women were often more menacing in
tone, despite their often comic drawings. ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’
 Introduction 9
warns one propaganda poster, while another cautions against the hor-
rific results of, emphatically female, sexual promiscuity: ‘The “easy”
girl-friend spreads Syphilis and Gonorrhea, which unless properly
treated may result in blindness, insanity, premature death’ (Reprinted in
­Darracott and Loftus (eds.) (1981): 30 and 47). Patriotism and loyalty
to the nation’s men were thus expected of women, but their allegedly
volatile desires were, at the same time, a cause for constant concern. Par-
allels between propaganda posters and films of the period are multiple.
For instance the 1945 film Waterloo Road (Sidney Gilliat) expresses a
similar worry over women’s potential vulnerability to male seduction,
with Joy S­ helton playing a lonely hausfrau falling into the markedly ‘ex-
otic’ charms of Stewart Granger’s character in the absence of her soldier
husband, played by John Mills. The portrayals of women in the cinema
of the immediate post-war years are thus fraught with contradiction and
conflict.
Uncertainties about what women’s role in post-war society should look
like were reflected in government policy as well as in public discourses
about the wartime. With men returning to the traditionally masculine
roles in the workplace, measures were taken to secure women back into
domestic existence, and their role as mothers was emphasised in media
and political discussions, in particular through pronatalist social policy
and rhetoric. Women’s maternal role, however, was not only to do with
raising children but also with supporting the reintegration of returning
men into society and the (heterosexual) family. That is, in addition to
the potential estrangement of families, several readers of wartime mas-
culinities and war cinema have commented on the homosociality of the
war experience and the returning soldier’s difficulty in forsaking such
homosocial experience. Raynes Minns, for instance, cites a returning
soldier lamenting losing the bonds between men: ‘I’ve had such a fine
time with the chaps […] It almost makes me wish the war weren’t over!’
(1980: 199). The foregoing of homosocial attachments formed during
the war is depicted with melancholy in many of the films of the period,
and one of the recurring themes discussed in this book is post-war alien-
ation from society, family, and the self, and the problematic of returning
to ‘normalcy’ after the war – both for women and for men. Films such
as The Long Memory (1953), discussed in Chapter 4 of this book, and
A Matter of Life and Death (1946), analysed in Chapter 3, arguably
mourn the loss of homosocial attachments on screen. The reshuffling
of gender roles, sexual norms, and family life during the war, together
with the often long periods of separation, meant that the demobilisation
of soldiers and the return to family life were not without their problems,
both psychologically and socially.
Entry into the post-war period was equally faltering on the political
front. Even though Britain and the Allies emerged from the war vic-
torious, it left Britain’s former status as a world power undermined.
10 Introduction
In international politics, the end of the war meant the shifting, rather
than ceasing, of global tensions. The post-war period was characterised
by the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. The combination of grief,
hope, and uncertainty was elemental to the post-war experience, and,
in ­Britain, it left its mark on post-war politics and cinema alike. The
latter half of the 1940s was a period of dramatic social ­restructuring in
Britain that aimed socially and economically to rehabilitate the country
after the war. The Butler Act in 1944 made universal secondary ed-
ucation free, while the two successive post-war Labour governments
embarked on a series of further social reforms as well as government
interventions in the economy. Attlee’s government, which came to power
in July 1945, initiated substantial reforms that were planned to target
social inequalities. In their 1945 manifesto, ‘Let Us Face the Future’,
the newly elected Labour government had set extensive goals ‘to ensure
full employment, the nationalisation of several key industries, an urgent
housing programme [and] the creation of a new national health service’,
and indeed, the most notable of the post-war reforms was the launch
of the National Health Service (NHS) in July 1948 (Kynaston 2007: 21).
The new post-war government was initially backed by the majority of
the electorate, who supported reform and saw austerity measures as
a necessary evil that was needed to rehabilitate the war-torn economy.
The new government’s policies, however, rapidly met with middle-class
opposition (Kynaston 2007: 171). If national unity across class boundar-
ies had been laboriously constructed and maintained to keep up morale
during the war, in the immediate post-war period, such unity, whether
organic or rhetorically created, seemed to waver.
The road to socio-economic recovery was thus slow, and the entry
into the post-war period did not mean immediate alleviation of poverty
and social ills. Film director Noël Coward remarked, ‘I always felt that
England would be bloody uncomfortable during the immediate post-war
period, and it is now almost a certainty that it will be so’ (2000: 36).
The winter of 1946–47 was infamously cold, with heavy snowfall and
severe weather blocking coal supplies and resulting in a fuel crisis (Street
1997: 14). The winter saw attempts to ease the strain on the struggling
British economy, which had direct impacts on the film industry as well.
In an attempt to restrict the leakage of funds outside the UK, the gov-
ernment introduced taxes on many imported goods, including films; the
‘Dalton duty’, set in August 1947, meant a 75 per cent duty on American
films. The American film industry retaliated with a boycott, and the
issue was resolved when negotiations resulted in the Anglo-American
Film ­Agreement in 1948, according to which ‘the duty was removed
in exchange for a blocking arrangement whereby American companies
could remit no more than $17 million a year’ (Street 1997: 14–15). The
discontent with the American presence in the UK towards the end of
the war was further worsened by the post-war shift in economic power
 Introduction 11
from Britain to the United States, and any animosity towards the United
States after the war was certainly not alleviated by a certain amount
of cultural envy. After the Dalton duty was removed in March 1948,
American films were once again distributed in Britain, and, as Brian
McFarlane notes, in 1950, ‘of the 400 films distributed, only 72 were
made in the UK’ (2005: 181).
Despite the difficulties of the first years after the war, already in 1948
and 1949 Britain welcomed some relaxation of rationing, and as the
country was going into the new decade, the austerity of the immediate
post-war period slowly started to ease. The early 1950s was a time of
gradual recovery, and the Festival of Britain in 1951, held across the
UK, was organised to celebrate British arts and science, and to enhance
post-war morale and the sense of recovery from the war. The increasing
economic prosperity of the 1950s also had an impact on Britain’s class
structure, and the years between 1938 and 1951 saw a 50 per cent in-
crease in professional jobs that were the foundation of the expansion of
the middle class (Hopkins 1963: 157–60). Due to the relative increase
in wealth, the link between family and consumerism strengthened
during the period (Haste 1992: 150). The changes in class structures
and consumerism were further reflected in social norms: Sue Harper and
­Vincent Porter argue that the shift in class structures and the emergence
of the teenager as a distinct social category during the decade resulted
in the ‘decline of deference’: the collapse of ‘old patterns of social def-
erence, which had been so much in evidence in class society and the
cultural norms relating to it’ (2003: 1). The problematic of changing
social norms, especially with regard to young people, will be discussed
in Chapter 4.
With socio-economic changes came political ones: in 1951 the
­Conservatives won the general election, and Winston Churchill was
elected as prime minister; thirteen years of successive Conservative gov-
ernments, from 1951 to 1964, were to follow. After the death of King
George VI in 1952, 1953 was the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s corona-
tion, and the potential for a ‘New Elizabethan’ age was hoped for by
many. Indeed, the dramatic sociopolitical changes in the eight years after
the war resulted in new narratives of British history and national iden-
tity being actively sought out. The ideals of the ‘New Elizabethans’ were
presented in The Times, which reflected, two months prior to Queen
Elizabeth’s coronation, as follows:

[T]he Coronation is the nation’s feast of mystical renewal. We have

passed through a grey and melancholy winter, dark with natural
disaster […] But the spring comes with its annual message that all di-
sasters and losses can be transcended by the unconquerable power of
new life. As a nation, as a Commonwealth, we take as our supremely
representative person our young QUEEN, and in her inauguration
12 Introduction
dedicating the future by the ancient forms, we declare our faith that
life itself rises out of the shadow of death, that victory is wrested out
of the appearances of failure, that the transfiguration of which our
nature is capable is not a denial of our temporal evanescence but the
revelation of its deepest meaning.
[The Times, 6 April 1953, quoted in
Heather Wiebe (2012: 109)]

The language here is rich in contradiction and paradox, dramatically

suggesting that ‘life itself rises out of the shadow of the death’; victory in-
termingles with failure; ancient forms create new life; and ‘temporal ev-
anescence’ is conquered by ‘deep’, eternal ideals. The New ­Elizabethans
thus looked back to a mystical cultural past to forge a new ­national
identity, anchoring a vision of the nation’s future in the post-war, post-­
empire period. The effect is somewhat eerie, yet it depicts the paradoxical
post-war period rather fittingly, painting a picture of a nation hauntingly
stuck somewhere between its past and future.

Inside, Outside, and Somewhere In-Between:

Race and Sexuality

In his work on nationality, Michael Billig fittingly asserts that ‘[t]here

can be no “us” without a “them”’ (1995: 78). British cinema of the post-
war period is full of ‘us’ and ‘them’, insiders and outsiders, as well as
those somewhere in-between. Any nation state is inevitably divided by
subcategories and intersecting micro-cultures informed by factors such
as class, ethnicity, religion, and region, and the distinction of being on
the inside or outside is always an inevitably complex one. The Ealing
comedy Whiskey Galore (Alexander Kendrick 1949) is a classic portrayal
of the national divisions within Britain. In the film, the Todday islanders
are distraught by a shortage of whiskey, and they scheme against the
English Home Guard commander Waggett (Basil Radford), who aims
to confiscate a load of whiskey stranded in a cargo ship. While Whiskey
Galore makes comedy out of the outsider-insider positioning, other por-
trayals are much grimmer. Some directors and actors within the genres
of crime and melodrama had a fascination with the problematic of the
outsider, and their work is of particular interest in this book. Director
Robert Hamer’s work in films such as Dead of Night (1945), It Always
Rains on Sunday (1947), and The Long Memory (1953) explores the con-
flicted relationship between society and the individual through outsiders.
Meanwhile, actor Dirk Bogarde developed a niche in his career as a por-
trayer of ­outsiders in films such as The Blue Lamp (1950) and Hunted
and The Gentle Gunman (both 1952), as discussed in Chapter 4 of this
book. Trevor Howard’s role as the disillusioned returning soldier in They
Made Me a Fugitive (1947) offers a further example of the investigation
 Introduction 13
of outsider masculinity in crime cinema, while James Mason’s roles as
the violent Byronic males in Gainsborough melodramas present a more
emotionally flamboyant take on the issue. Very few women make the
list of on-screen outsiders, even less so in crime film than in melodrama.
There are some examples, though: in particular Margaret ­Lockwood’s
roles as seductive villains in Gainsborough melodramas, such as The
Wicked Lady (1945), discussed in Chapter 3, portray female outsiders. In
addition, Diana Dors’s leading role in Yield to the Night (1956) is excep-
tional in its focus on a female death row prisoner. The fewer examples of
female outsiders on screen is partly due to the tame femme fatale tradition
in British crime cinema but also because, as I shall argue in this book,
British cinema of the immediate post-war period seems to be obsessively
preoccupied with male identity. In fact, it is not just female outsiders who
are missing – rather, any female leading roles are few and far between.
Who, then, was thought of as an ‘outsider’ in post-war Britain? First,
during the war, British attitudes to Continental Europe, and Germany
in particular, were ambiguous, which was reflected earlier in the war in
films such as Went the Day Well? (1942), in which the fear of German
invasion was acutely present. Yet, even though the Second World War is
often ­remembered in British public imagination as a conflict in which the
­democratic Britain persevered, against all odds, against the Fascist Nazi
regime, ‘anti-alien’ sentiments emerged in Britain as well. ‘Antisemitism
in Britain’, Aaron Goldman insists, ‘was given a new lease on life which
reached its peak at the height of the war in 1943’ (1984: 37–8). Accord-
ing to Goldman, the British g­ overnment rejected large-scale immigra-
tion of German Jews because it was thought that ‘Britain’s first duty was
to help her own people’ (1984: 38).8 Aside from instances of outright
anti-Semitism, Weight points to some of the further, inevitable ironies of
the contradictory combination of Britain’s empire tradition and the war
against the fascist Nazi regime:

Despite the fact that one of the nation’s central war aims was to de-
feat the most pathologically racist regime Europe had ever seen, the
British had a clear and certain belief in their own superiority as white
people. Political enthusiasm for the empire may have been in decline,
but the racial understanding of Britishness was alive and well.
(2002: 79)

One of the results of the weakening of ‘political enthusiasm for the em-
pire’ was the decolonisation of some important British colonies, most
notably the partition of India, and the founding of the Commonwealth
in 1949. A year earlier, the 1948 Nationality Act had allowed people
from around the Commonwealth to move into Britain to work, result-
ing in, on the one hand, the mass immigration of workers and, on the
other, overt and covert racism.9 The government’s post-war immigration
14 Introduction
policies were ambiguous and often contradictory, encouraging ­Europeans
to work in Britain while ‘resisting the independent migration to ­Britain
of thousands of colonial citizens of colour’ and encouraging British mi-
gration into the dominions (Paul 1997: xii). In the late 1940s and early
1950s, ‘race’ was therefore a continuous subject of public discourse, yet
racism was not a popular theme in cinematic presentations of either war-
time or post-war Britain.
One of the first on-screen portrayals of racism in the British context
was Basil Dearden’s 1951 crime film The Pool of London, which tells the
story of a merchant ship docking in London. The main protagonist is one
of the mariners, Johnny (Earl Cameron), who is a black Jamaican. The
film is one of the first British features to interrogate the national space as
potentially hostile for ethnic minorities as it explicitly shows the protago-
nist experiencing racism in London. The film is also the first British film to
portray an interracial romantic relationship. Later in the decade, Dearden
became a key figure in the emergence of the ‘social problem’ film, which, as
Marcia Landy posits, ‘was particularly sensitive to the “news of the day”
and to immediate social issues’ (1996: 198). In one of his social problem
films, the 1959 crime drama Sapphire, Dearden further explored the rac-
ism faced by immigrants from the Caribbean. The film opens as a young,
mixed-race pregnant woman is found murdered. She is first thought to
be white, but as her ethnic identity is ‘discovered’, the prejudices of the
police and the community are revealed through people’s attitudes towards
the deceased Sapphire (Yvonne Buckingham). The film also makes use of
flashbacks to depict Sapphire’s life, while the prejudices experienced by her
brother (Earl Cameron) are described in the present of the narrative. At the
end of the film, the killer is revealed to be the sister of Sapphire’s (white)
boyfriend – and the father of her unborn child – the murder motivated by
racism. The film’s ‘surprise’ ending turns its gaze and blame on the racist
individual and thus provides a rather more nuanced take on the hysterical
fear of the racial ‘other’ than its predecessor The Pool of London.
Another ‘unutterable’ outsider identity in late-1940s and early-1950s
British society, more pertinent to my particular line of inquiry in this
book, was homosexuality, which was indeed illegal in the UK until
1967.10 While the 1957 Wolfenden Report can be seen to pave the way
to the subsequent decriminalisation of homosexuality in the 1960s, it
promoted state non-interference in sexual matters rather than ­endorsing
reform and taking a proactive stand for homosexual rights as such.
Meanwhile, the law still viewed homosexuality as at best ‘an unfortu-
nate condition’ and at worst a ‘sickness’ that required treatment, and
‘offenders’ were given a choice between imprisonment and chemical ster-
ilisation (Weeks 1983: 166).11
Not only was homosexuality illegal: its representation was strictly ta-
boo in the 1940s and 1950s, when public discourses around sexuality
per se were restrained. Sue Aspinall has argued that inflexible attitudes
 Introduction 15
towards sexuality in the post-war period were partly due to the lack of
reliable birth control, combined with the fact that the status of marriage,
up until the 1960s, remained unquestioned ‘as the only legitimate site of
sexual activity’, which created an unescapable ‘connection between sex-
ual activity and procreation’ (1983: 37). Despite the restrained attitudes
towards sexuality, however, there was a significant homosexual subcul-
ture in Britain, especially in larger cities such as London.12 ­Further, the
fact that homosexuality was illegal in 1940s and 1950s Britain does
not mean that non-heterosexual identities are absolutely absent and
­excluded from cinematic portrayals of the period – this book will argue
that rather the contrary is the case.13 Sinfield insists that in post-war
literature, a

subliminal status made homosexuals a convenient way to represent

barely apprehensible threats of destruction and dissolution. They
appear repeatedly in novels of the period as the almost unthinkable
other. Their presence is permitted only on the condition that it is
negated.
(2004: 77, original emphasis)

In British cinema, Basil Dearden’s 1961 social problem film Victim, star-
ring Dirk Bogarde, was the first film to directly explore homosexuality,
yet a similar pattern of homosexuality as ‘the almost unthinkable other’
to that which Sinfield observes in the literature of the period can be
detected in post-war cinema as well. In this book, I am interested in
the undercurrents of sexual ‘otherness’ that run through and colour the
portrayals of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality in the cinema of the
immediate post-war period. The threat posed by queer identities seems
to lurk at the margins of portrayals of the crises of the family and nation
in particular. In this book, to unpick these nuanced anxieties over sex-
ualities, I shall look at aesthetic choices as well as both male and female
characters who destabilise the structures of nationalities and sexualities.
What is evident from this brief outline of historical contexts is that the
total war simultaneously blurred and crystallised national and sexual
identities, and anxieties experienced and lived out in the British c­ ontext.
As Catherine Hall insists, ‘although nations are always in process, a­ lways
being made, there are particular defining moments, of key ­legislative
change within a state, or military victory or defeat, for example, which
can be utilised to examine the state of the nation’ (2000: 107). By the
same token, national identity, in Robert Murphy’s lucid definition, ‘is
not a natural, timeless essence, but an intermittent, combinatory his-
torical product, arising at moments of contestation of different political
and geographical boundaries’ (2000: 75). Murphy has further argued
that ‘in Britain, maybe more than anywhere else, the Second World War
is profoundly important to the national psyche’ (2000: 1). In this book,
16 Introduction
I analyse the period 1945–53, the eventful and volatile time when ­Britain
made the transition from ‘total war’ into the immediate post-war period,
as such a ‘defining moment’ or a ‘moment of contestation’ – or rather, a
series of such defining, contesting moments. This was a period of tran-
sition, uncertainty, of being in-between; it was a period during which
the past was uncannily and painfully present yet, simultaneously, when
the future was almost tangible. Such sociopolitical transition and un-
certainty often expose the fragility of identities as well as presupposed
structures of identity construction, not only in their specific context but
on a larger scale as well. Arguably, we are seeing a similar ‘moment of
contestation’ in 2015–18 as Europe is facing the aftermath of a mas-
sive refugee crisis, and extremist, nationalist, populist, racist, and anti-­
feminist rhetoric and politics blossom in the UK, Europe, and the United
States.14 In this context, looking at the intertwined structures of nation-
alities and sexualities of our recent past seems particularly pertinent,
and this book explores how heterosexuality and nationality are some of
the most prominent frameworks for the construction of identities in our
time: structures that, to paraphrase Hanne Blank, are naturalised and
presented as ‘unremarkable’ because they are ‘the standard[s] by which
everything else is measured’ (2012: 165).15 Roland Barthes’s model of
myth as metalanguage is useful here in thinking through heterosexu-
ality and nationality as such naturalised, and therefore rather slippery,
structures. Barthes argues that myth is a ‘metalanguage, because it is
a second language, in which one speaks about the first’ (2000: 139).
In this book, following Barthes’s phrasing, I argue that heterosexuality
and nationality are the metalanguages in which the languages of self
and identity are, often uncomfortably, spoken in the context of British
cinema in the period 1945–53. Before discussing the structures of sex-
ualities and nationalities in more detail, a few words on British cinema
and genre are due.

Melodramas in the Post-War

At the core of this book is the concept of melodrama, which is infamously

elusive, indeed a term that even stubbornly defies definition. In this book
I am interested in, and engage with, the concept as an analytic tool rather
than purely as a genre term; as an element that is present across the ge-
neric spectrum but, in the post-war British context, in Gainsborough
melodrama and crime film in particular. An obsession with emotion,
gender, and family – often labelled as somehow ‘­deviant’ – and a con-
stant risk of overflowing emotion, pain, and pleasure are central to my
understanding of the term. In Linda Williams’s phrasing, ­melodrama
can be viewed as a ‘system of excess’ that ‘stands in c­ ontrast to more
“dominant” modes of realistic, goal-oriented narrative’ (1991: 3). As
Christine Gledhill insists, however, viewing melodrama as a ‘mode’,
 Introduction 17
rather than strictly a genre, ‘does not evade the problem of generic defi-
nition’ (2007: 316).16 Therefore, before moving on to discuss melodrama
as a ‘mode’ and an analytic tool in relation to this research in more
­detail, it is necessary to say a few words about one of the most persistent
critical discussions in British film studies: the opposition of realism and
melodrama. The interaction between realism and melodrama, perhaps
in British film in particular but in cinema in general, is a complicated
one. What is certain, however, is that the relationship between realism
and melodrama has strongly informed the process of cinema making,
audience perception, and critical practice in Britain, and it is closely tied
with wider debates around realism and expressionism. Expressionism
and melodrama, Richard Murphy suggests, both attempt ‘to point to
a meaning which lies in the realm of the unspeakable’ (1999: 143–4).17
Meanwhile, Jim Leach rightly argues that British cinema has always
depended on an intricate interaction between realist and expressionist
traditions, and that ‘the sense of being in between is a symptom of larger
concerns about British culture’ (2004: 2).18
In British cinema of the 1940s, Ealing and Gainsborough, respectively,
presented the realist and expressionist traditions of cinema making.
While Ealing’s realist style focussed largely on contemporary portrayals
of the war effort and British national identity, often with somewhat pro-
pagandist intentions, the majority of Gainsborough melodramas, such
as The Wicked Lady (1945), Caravan (1946), The Magic Bow (1946),
and Fanny by Gaslight (1944), took the viewer to a time and place far
removed from the war and the contemporary sociohistorical context.19
While Ealing’s realism was often seen to epitomise the newly discovered
‘national’ cinematic style, melodrama by contrast was dubbed a ‘foreign’
genre; an antithesis to the serious values and aesthetic of quality British
realism; and, simultaneously, a poor copy of its Hollywood counterpart.
The production of Gainsborough melodramas was characterised by
‘artistic freedom within financial limits’ (Harper 1983: 30). That is, the
rigorous financial discipline practised by, in the first instance, J. A
­ rthur
Rank and, in the second, by the Gainsborough producers who imposed
financial constraints on productions while allowing art directors to
execute their views relatively freely (Harper 1983: 30). This enabled
a notoriously fast-paced production cycle of the films that appealed to
contemporary audiences. Despite, or indeed because of, their popular-
ity, Gainsborough melodramas were bitterly criticised by contemporary
critics. The critical dismissal of the films was informed by factors such as
gender and class, and, as Harper posits, critics disapproved of the films’
‘low-status’ female audiences and their rejection of the ideals of ‘good
taste’ in particular (1994: 122). Landy has further argued that the criti-
cal rejection of the melodramas, and genre film more generally, because
of its ‘encouragement of spurious pleasures’ through its non-intellectual,
non-realist content, ‘must be ascribed to the refusal to confront the ways
18 Introduction
in which mass cultural texts harbour knowledge of unresolved conflicts
and desires’ (1991: 8). It was not only contemporary critics who judged
Gainsborough melodramas harshly. In an interview with Sue Aspinall
and Robert Murphy in 1983, actress and Gainsborough regular Phyllis
Calvert states, ‘I hated the films. […] In retrospect, they’re even worse
now than they seemed at the time. I find it very difficult to say anything
nice about them’ (1983: 60). In fact, it was not until the late 1980s and
1990s that anyone had ‘anything nice’ to say about Gainsborough, when
a shift in critical focus with regard to genre film occurred, with feminist
film critics such as Sue Harper, Marcia Landy, and Christine Gledhill
re-evaluating Gainsborough and its ‘spurious pleasures’.
Gainsborough melodrama, however, did not demand to be taken se-
riously to begin with. In a sombre sociopolitical situation, the appeal
of a genre that was anything but was tangible, and the popularity of
Gainsborough’s aesthetic then was partly to do with escapism and its
­quality of ‘unashamed fantasy’, to quote Sue Aspinall (1983: 29). In part,
­Gainsborough’s use of unrealist props was due to the faltering economics
of the production context, but the role of fantasy was equally important.
Phyllis Calvert summarises the mission statement of G ­ ainsborough to
Picturegoer in a letter from 1945: ‘I want to see film producers ­forgetting
all about the war and concentrating on entertainment’ (23 June
1945: 6) – a view confirmed by another Gainsborough regular, Patricia
Roc, who confesses that she enjoys playing in costume pictures ‘for the
very feminine reason that the clothes of by-gone days with their silks and
satins give her a luxurious feeling women haven’t had during the war’
(Picturegoer 15 September 1945: 11). These films presented the audience
with melodramatic visions of gender and sexuality: instead of ideals of
restrained, legitimate ‘British’ masculinity, they portrayed sadistically
violent, brooding, and erotic Byronic males of the romanticised past;
instead of the ideal of the modest, nurturing, and self-sacrificing woman,
they paraded onto the screen a series of hedonistic, sexually expres-
sive, and morally corrupt females. Gainsborough melodrama is often
­characterised as ‘woman’s film’, and these films featured strong female
protagonists, played by the same array of actors (Margaret Lockwood,
Phyllis Calvert, Patricia Roc, Jean Kent), and engaged with a thematic
and ­visual aesthetic that was targeted at female audiences. The produc-
tion of the melodramas, however, was largely in the hands of men, with
the exception of Betty Box, Muriel Box, and Wendy Toye.
The post-war orientation away from a war thematic was, however, not
only a female concern. In an August 1945 Picturegoer, one reader, a re-
turned prisoner of war, W. Robinson, blatantly asserts that he does ‘not
want to see war films’ (4 August 1945: 14). This reader’s sentiment seemed
to reflect the general atmosphere, and the turn away from war films to
skirting around post-war issues in crime cinema was one of the major
developments after the war was over, continuing well into the 1950s.
 Introduction 19
While melodrama is often viewed as a counter-canon for realist cinema,
melodrama and crime share a certain transgressive reputation, not least
because both genres are anchored in the ‘foreign’ tradition of expres-
sionist cinema and offer portrayals of non-­normative expressions of gen-
der and sexuality. 20 Definitions of melodrama often emphasise excess
and inauthenticity as well as a preoccupation with desire and emotion.
Pam Cook, for instance, defines melodrama as ‘blatantly escapist’ and
‘far beyond the bounds of “good taste” in its emphasis on sex, sadism,
violence and brutality’ (1983: 23). Both masculinity and femininity are
excessive in Gainsborough melodrama, and as Aspinall suggests, the
‘films are built upon a series of polarised opposites’ (1983: 33). 21 Impor-
tantly, these same qualities of excess and escapism as well as the empha-
sis on sex and violence are also elemental to the crime genre. This book
builds on the criticism after the 1980s that started to view melodrama
as something beyond genre and employs the term as a wider interpretive
and analytical term, denoting the complex reproduction of nation and
sexualities through the process of repetition. Gledhill was one of the
first critics to challenge the distinction between melodrama and realism,
noting that it was not a justifiable division since ‘melodramatic rhetoric
informs westerns, gangster and horror films, psychological thrillers and
family melodramas alike’ (1987: 13). It is undoubtedly fundamental to
the category of noir, as suggested by the inclusion of a number of film
noirs in Martin Shingler and John Mercer’s filmography of international
melodrama (2004: 124). The parallels between melodrama and noir
have been detected by critics of crime cinema as well, perhaps most per-
tinently by Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy, who aptly define British
crime film as ‘lukewarm melodrama’ (1999: 2).
Even though the Gainsborough melodrama cycle was short-lived, and
it declined after 1948, British cinema continued to be preoccupied with
the melodramatic in genres such as the social problem film and Hammer
horror. Of the emerging cinematic styles of the post-war period, the spiv
cycle looked forward to the social problem films emerging in the 1960s,
taking a more realist approach to social issues, whereas crime cinema
and the Ealing comedy genre of the late 1940s and early 1950s are more
flamboyant in style. Crime cinema of the late 1940s and early 1950s
can be thought to carry the melodramatic torch of Gainsborough into
a later era albeit in a different tone and with changed points of focus. 22
That is, while the 1940s Gainsborough melodramas can be seen to have
­responded to the escapist needs of women during the war, 1950s crime
cinema’s target audience was predominantly male; the rise of crime cin-
ema, according to Street, is moreover a testament to ‘the increasing ob-
session with male problems’ in the post-war period (1997: 72).
This book argues that, while targeted at men and women respectively,
crime film and Gainsborough melodrama share a parallel preoccupation
with gender and sexuality, and, more specifically, with the need to purge
20 Introduction
queer elements from their narratives, which warrants such a compara-
tive viewpoint. Indeed, melodrama and noir are arguably kindred genres
rather than generic opposites, and a number of the films discussed in
this book skirt the generic borders of crime film and melodrama – not
least in visual terms. In the following chapters, one of the guiding lines
of thought is consequently that melodrama is equally elemental for both
British post-war melodrama and crime film. Even the most distinctly
realist characters in crime film succumb to the seductions of melodrama.
With my choice of films in this book, I therefore agree with Alan Lovell,
who has insisted that ‘British cinema is often most exciting when re-
straint and excess interact with each other’ (2009: 8).
What can be contributed to the extensive criticism on late-1940s
and early-1950s British cinema is a text-oriented, comparative, and
­systematic study of melodrama in the crime and melodrama genres, em-
phasising the chronological and generic continuum that exists ­between
the two but moreover exposing the narrative and textual preoccupation
with the ‘deviant’, the queer, and the allegedly destructive. There is more
to be said about the persistent structures and rhetoric of melodrama in
these two genres and, more specifically, about the relation of melodrama
to sexualities and nationalities in British cinema in this particular his-
torical period of ‘moments of contestation’ (Murphy 2000: 75). Through
the, openly anachronistic, integration of contemporary, postmodern dis-
cussions on sexuality, queer theory, and nationality into the analyses
of the films in this book, it will be possible to tease out new ways of
looking at these films and of viewing the conflicts and contradictions
presented therein. Through this approach, this book also takes part in
the wider critical project of offering revisionist readings of post-war na-
tional ­cinemas in mainland Europe and the UK. Such readings allow for
investigating, often silent, nuances of our cultural pasts.

Identities and Their Theories

This book engages with often awkward and ambiguous terminology. In-
deed, melodrama but even more so queer and heterosexual, and nation
and nationality are widely debated terms, the complexity of which resists
any monolithic definitions. It is perhaps more appropriate to use the terms
in plural form: ‘heterosexualities’, ‘homosexualities’, ‘nationalities’, and
so forth. The difficulties around terminology warrant paying attention
to some of the various competing – and ­complementary – ­definitions of
nationalities and sexualities; rather than futilely ­attempting to tame the
terminology, I hope to benefit from such richly conflicting points of view.
First, the terms nationalism and nationality as structures are in con-
stant transition, somewhat paradoxical even. Michael Billig remarks
that ‘nationalism is simultaneously obvious and obscure’ (1995: 14),
while ­B enedict Anderson, famously, defined the nation as an ‘imagined
 Introduction 21
community’ and argued that nationality and nationalism are ‘cultural
artefacts of a particular kind’ (2006: 4). 23 The primary theoretical
backdrop for my thinking on nationalities in this book is the postmod-
ern gender studies scholarship, which has significantly added to these
canonical writings on the nation and nationalism that blatantly ignore
the gendered aspects of ‘imagining’ the nation. 24 Through its focus on
the parallel constructions of sexuality and nation in post-war British
films, this book adds to the body of scholarship that draws attention to
the gendered aspects of nationality and, in particular, to the performa-
tive nature of both sexuality and nations. Billig argues that ‘[t]he ideo-
logical habits, by which “our” nations are reproduced as nations, are
unnamed and, thereby, unnoticed’ (1995: 6). He goes on to ­introduce
the term ‘banal nationalism’ to draw attention from the ‘periphery’ to
the ‘centre’, to the nations and nationalities of the West (6). In a similar
manner, discourses around heterosexuality have tended to distract our
­attention to the ‘periphery’ instead of the ‘centre’, to reiterate B­ illig’s
point about nationalism, thus making heterosexuality invisible and
‘neutral’ in ­contrast to peripheral and allegedly ‘abnormal’ queer desires
and identities. Even though the emergence of the concepts of ‘hetero-
sexuality’ and ‘homosexuality’ date back to early sexology in the 19th
century, and as such, they are tied to a specific historical context, they
carry with them an illusion of naturalness (Blank 2012: 4). 25 This book
aims to investigate how such parallel discourses of nationality and het-
erosexuality, and their resulting doxaic status, operate on multiple levels
in the films discussed here.
Those theorists viewing nation and sexuality as performance form a
significant point of reference in this book. These critics build on Judith
Butler’s thinking on gender performativity, which, according to Butler,
‘is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its
effects through its naturalization in the context of the body’ (2006: xv).
Theorists such as Homi K. Bhabha, Jen Harvie, and Tamar Mayer have
expanded Butler’s thinking on gender to parallel nationality. Bhabha, for
instance, writes about the ‘performativity of language in the narratives
of the nation’ (1990b: 3). In the same vein, for Harvie, the ‘imagining’
of communities occurs via ‘cultural activities. […] And one of the ways
they will do so is through performance’ (2005: 2). Tamar Mayer further
argues that

The nation is comprised of sexed subjects whose ‘performativity’

constructs not only their own gender identity but the identity of the
entire nation as well. Through repetition of accepted norms and
­behaviors – control over reproduction, militarism and heroism, and
heterosexuality – members help to construct the privileged nation;
equally, the repetitive performance of these acts in the name of the
nation helps to construct gender and sexuality. Because nation,
22 Introduction
gender and sexuality are all constructed in opposition, or at least
in relation to, an(O)ther, they are all part of culturally constructed
hierarchies, and all of them involve power.
(2000: 5)

To reiterate, the ‘naturalness’ of both nationality and sexuality are

turned into melodramatic realisations of the polar opposites they seek to
purge: straight becomes queer and national becomes alien in often swift
and violent twists of plot. In the realm of both gender and nationality,
this process of naturalised corporeal performance is always at risk of
overflowing and becoming ‘otherness’ or, indeed, melodrama. The lin-
guistic and rhetoric performance of nationality is perhaps most tangibly
observed in the political realm that Mayer and others write about, but
the sexual and the national are equally inextricably linked elsewhere.
Aside from melodrama, force, coercion, and violence seem to be
­justifiable and apt terms in the discussion of the conjunctions of nation
and sexuality. It is paramount, however, to define what I mean by force
and violence here. Nations, Olivia Harris argues, have ‘little official tol-
erance for acts of physical violence perpetrated by [their] citizens’ (1994:
40). Yet force, coercion, and the potential for violence seem to be at the
very core of nations; indeed, as Billig insists, ‘violence is seldom far from
the surface of nationalism’s history. The struggle to create the nation-state
is a struggle for the monopoly of the means of violence’ (1995: 28). In
this view, in the discourse of nationalities, the question is not so much
whether force, or in extreme cases violence, should be used but by whom,
and at whom, force is used.26 Penelope Harvey and Peter Gow posit that
sexuality and ­violence are usually seen ‘as contrasting modes of relating,
sexuality ­associated with attraction, violence with separation’ (1994: 13).
Force, however, seems to be inherent in the structures of both nation and
sexuality. Louis Althusser’s model of the ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’
further helps me think through and clarify the concept of ideological force
and discursive coercion in the context of cinema, nation, and sexualities.
The film industry, in Althusser’s thinking, can be seen as part of the ‘Ideo-
logical State Apparatuses’ and more specifically ‘the cultural Ideological
State Apparatuses’ that function through ideological, invisible coercion
(2010: 1341). Althusser makes a useful distinction between ‘Repressive
State Apparatuses’, such as the army and the police, that are overtly vio-
lent and ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, which include different facets of
the cultural sphere. For A­ lthusser, ‘the Ideological State Apparatuses func-
tion […] predominantly by ideology, but they also function secondarily by
repression, even if ultimately […] this is very attenuated and ­concealed,
even symbolic’ (2010: 1342, original emphasis). For the purposes of this
book, Althusser’s basic ­distinction between overt, repressive violence and
invisible, symbolic ideology, and the coercion attached therein are perhaps
most useful when investigating cultural texts and identities.27
 Introduction 23
The interweaving of the film industry and ideology also has to do
with narratives. In my thinking on narrative subject formation, I draw,
first, from Billig’s idea of ‘flagging’ the nation. Billig argues that ‘the
nation is indicated, or flagged’ in people’s mundane experience (1995: 6).
I am here interested in how such ‘flagging’ of nations and national
subjects occurs in narratives, which is why Adriana Cavarero’s theo-
rising forms a further theoretical backdrop for this research. Building
on ­Cavarero’s theorising, this book follows ‘the peculiar post-modern
version’ of narratology, which is ‘interested in the text as a construc-
tion of ­identity’ (2000: 71). Stevi Jackson’s analysis of a narrative model
of ‘self-­construction’ is also applicable here. Jackson stresses that ‘the
gendered, sexual self is never a finished product, but constantly being
remade’ (1999: 24). In her model of narratives of self, experiences of
selfhood are ‘constantly worked over, interpreted, theorised through the
narrative forms and devices available to us’ (1999: 24). Jackson thus
builds on the psychoanalytic notion that the past, and more specifically
childhood, is the core of identity formation, but she emphasises the role
of the present, which forms the constantly reconstructed, and therefore
unstable, past and ‘our understanding of who and what we are through
the stories we tell to ourselves and others’ (1999: 24). That is not to
undermine the role of the past, however, as in many of the crime films
and melodramas analysed in this book, past traumas are determinants
of identity. In fact, we cannot escape the founding discursive violence of
identity formation to begin with. That is, force is inevitably attached to
subject formation per se: separation from the mother, in psychoanalytic
terms, is a violent process.
This book therefore investigates how identity formation is a narrative
act and how the narratives of what and who characters are in these films
explore the problematic of what and who one, indeed anyone, can and
cannot be within the frameworks of nationalities and sexualities. The
realm of what an individual is can be seen to include, for instance, their
nationality and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, class, status, and reli-
gion, while the realm of who an individual is proves more challenging to
define, at least philosophically: Hannah Arendt insists that ‘the moment
we want to say who someone is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into
saying what he is’ (1998: 181, original emphasis). It becomes evident
from the analysis of the films that the axes of who and what charac-
ters are often exist in powerful and painful contradictions, yet they are
simultaneously difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish. Nonetheless,
the question of who someone is allows for more room for contradiction,
ambivalence, and even paradox than the question what someone is. The
ultimate question of identity, ‘who are you’, often seems to be at the
very centre of narratives in the crime films, such as The October Man
(1947) and The Long Memory (1953), as well as the melodramas, such
as ­M adonna of the Seven Moons (1945) and Caravan (1946), discussed
24 Introduction
in this book. In these films, furthermore, such questions of identity are
often tied with nationality and sexuality in particular. As David T. E ­ vans
puts it, ‘It is of course precisely because sex in our culture is believed to
speak the truth about ourselves and expresses the essence of our being
that it is the focus of such intense debate’ (1993: 138). It is therefore no
surprise that sexuality is a central concern in the narratives of self and
nation in the films of the post-war period. The tone in which the films
address the problematic of national and sexual selves ranges from com-
edy to horror, from mourning to joy – in true melodramatic fashion.

Notes
1 For more detailed accounts of the historical events of the period, please refer
to critics such as David Kynaston (1995, 2009), Kenneth O. Morgan (1990),
Sonya Rose (2004), Robert Mackay (2002), and Gill Plain (2013), whose
research and reporting on original historical resources, such as manuscripts
in historical archives, I am indebted to in my own research for this book.
2 For a useful introduction to the complex nature of propaganda in the Second
World War, see Jo Fox (2015) ‘The Propaganda War’. For a discussion of
home front propaganda in Britain during the war, see Marion Yass (1983)
This is Your War: Home Front Propaganda in the Second World War.
3 Mass-Observation’s research on cinemagoers is discussed and summarised
in Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan (eds.) (1987) Mass-Observation
at the Movies.
4 Gill Plain argues that in realist narratives such as In Which We Serve (Noël
Coward 1942), the ‘fiction’ of national unity during the war was maintained
and constructed, in part, through ‘group hero’ characters who united a
­‘heterogeneous’ community with ‘a common purpose’ (2006: 59).
5 Angus Calder reports that in the 1940s, three-quarters of the adult popula-
tion were regular cinemagoers, 1946 marking a peak in cinema attendance,
with 31.4 million viewers a week (1992: 423–4). Because it is considered the
‘golden age’ of British cinema, the 1940s have attracted much critical atten-
tion. For an outline of sociohistorical and production contexts, see for in-
stance Robert Murphy (2000), Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey ­R ichards (1994),
Sarah Street (1997), Andrew Higson (2000), and Margaret ­Dickinson and
Sarah Street (1985). For discussions of cinema, gender, and nation, see for
instance Danielle Hipkins and Gill Plain (eds.) (2007) and Plain (2006).
For a study of British stars and stardom, see for instance Geoffrey Macnab
(2000) and Bruce Babington (ed.) (2001a).
6 In the post-war period, the ‘Rank Charm School’ that ran from 1946 to
1950 sought to emulate the American star system by coaching emerging
actors ‘to behave like stars’ and produced publicity material to reinforce
the stars’ public images (Street 1997: 134, original emphasis). See Street
(1997: 134–49) and Macnab (1993) for detailed discussions on the Rank
Charm School. See also The Journal of British Cinema and Television’s
January 2015 issue on stardom.
7 For instance The National Savings Committee’s propaganda poster ‘Don’t
Take the Squander Bug’ targets women specifically: it displays a cartoon with
a woman working in a factory, telling a friend that she is going shopping; in
the next frame, the swastika-covered squander bug is tempting her to spend
her money, but the woman resists, thinking ‘I don’t suppose it’s worth half the
money’ (reprinted in Joseph Darracott and Belinda Loftus (eds.) 1981: 23).
 Introduction 25
8 For a history of Judaism in Britain, see Todd. M. Endelman (2002). For a
monograph on anti-Semitism in Britain during the Second World War, see
Tony Kushner (1989).
9 See Randall Hansen (2000) Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War
­Britain. For a history of immigration to Britain, see Robert Winder (2004)
Bloody Foreigners.
10 England and Wales initiated the partial decriminalisation of male homosex-
uality, with Scotland following suit in 1980 and Northern Ireland follow-
ing in 1982. The law criminalising homosexuality dated back to 1885, and
according to the law, all homosexual acts between men, both public and
private, were illegal (Jeffrey Weeks 1983: 11). For a discussion of the history
of lesbianism in Britain, see for instance Weeks (1983, Chapter 7).
11 The issues around homosexuality and citizenship during the Second World
War are still current today. In 2009, Gordon Brown issued an apology for
the treatment of the wartime codebreaker Alan Turing, who committed
suicide in 1954 after going through the process of chemical castration as
punishment for ‘gross indecency’ (‘PM Apology After Turing Petition’, BBC
News 2009); in 2015, Benedict Cumberbatch, who played Turing in a fea-
ture film, initiated a petition demanding the apology be extended to other
victims of the law as well (Dan Carrier 2015)
12 See Matt Houlbrook (2005) Queer London for a discussion of the queer
subcultures in London in the period 1918–57.
13 See also Stephen Bourne (1996) Brief Encounters: Lesbians and Gays in
British Cinema 1930–1971.
14 Notable examples of this are the election of Donald Trump as the president
of the United States in 2016 and the rise of the German radical right-wing
party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), to the status of third largest in the
country and its thus gaining a place in the German parliament Bundestag.
15 In the original quote that I have adapted from Blank (2012), she refers to
heterosexual privilege. I have expanded this to include nationality.
16 Gledhill’s chapter, ‘Melodrama’ (2007: 316–32), in Pam Cook (ed.) (2007)
offers a useful outline of the complex history of the ‘melodrama debate’
in film studies. I shall limit my discussion of melodrama primarily to the
­specific context of British film, and for the purposes of this book, I am lim-
iting my discussion to melodrama as a mode.
17 Murphy writes about literary melodrama here, yet his assertion is equally
pertinent to film melodrama.
18 Such an interaction is, evidently, at stake in post-war films such as Carol
Reed’s The Third Man (1949), the expressionism of which is present in el-
ements such as the little boy Hans who cries ‘murderer!’ at Holly Martins
(Joseph Cotton) and whose gigantic shadow looms over the dark streets of
Vienna and the wobbling balloon salesman approaching Major Calloway
(Trevor Howard) and his crew, who are waiting for the film’s villain Harry
Lime (Orson Welles) to appear. The balloon salesman and the little boy
evoke the imaginary, the psychological, and the uncanny, and thus belong to
the same realm as the film’s expressionist and inevitably ‘futuristic’ villain
Lime. Chapter 2 focusses on temporality and futurism in more detail.
19 Love Story (1944) and They Were Sisters (1945) were exceptions in the
Gainsborough repertoire in that they were set in contemporary Britain; also
The Man in Grey (1943) had a frame narrative in wartime England.
20 It is tempting to view Gainsborough as somehow counterhegemonic in rela-
tion to realism and its relationship with propaganda. Harper, however, sug-
gests, instead, the metaphor of ‘the patchwork quilt’ to depict the relationship
between audiences and films or indeed film culture in general (1994: 105).
26 Introduction
21 Cinema as an art form undeniably draws extensively from such polarised
opposites. A case in point is Picturegoer’s ‘Sally & I’ column series, in which
a husband and a wife discuss their (often stereotypically gendered) responses
to films. See also Teresa De Lauretis (1987) for a discussion of cinema as a
‘technology of gender’.
22 The decreasing popularity of Gainsborough was partly due to Rank’s fi-
nancial crisis, brought on by the American film boycott. Landy asserts that
another reason for the fading of the cycle was ‘the growing social constraints
in the post-war era concerning […] conventional attitudes toward women,
the nuclear family, and sexuality’ (1991: 43).
23 Even though Anderson’s book, first published in 1983, is somewhat out-
dated, and focussed on the emergence of premodern nationalisms enabled by
print capitalism, his work is still widely influential. One of the most debated
issues in contemporary studies of nationalities and nationalisms is the ques-
tion of ‘when’ and ‘how’ nations came into existence. The main branches
of the debate can be divided into four schools of thought. According to the
modernist approach, represented by theorists such as Ernest Gellner (1997,
2006), Eric Hobsbawm (1992, 1996), and David Gross (1985), the emer-
gence of nations is the result of modernity. Meanwhile, ethnosymbolists,
such as Michael Billig (1995) and Anthony D. Smith (1986, 1991), stress the
importance of symbols, myths, and traditions in the formation of nations –
a view that is perhaps closest to my thinking on nations as performance in
this book. According to the primordialist approach, represented most fa-
mously by Pierre van den Berghe (1981), nations are naturally occurring
and ancient, while the perennialists, such as Adrian Hastings (1997), insist
that nations are not ‘eternal’, but they existed for centuries before the rise of
modernity, and their emergence is not directly linked to modernity. For an
introductory discussion of the different approaches, see Atsuko Ichijo and
Gordana Uzelac (eds.) (2005) When is the Nation?
24 For an introductory discussion of the intersections of nation and gender, see
for instance Ruth Roach Pierson (2000) ‘Nations: Gendered, Racialized,
Crossed with Empire’, in Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall
(eds.) (2000): 41–61.
25 See Jonathan Ned Katz (2007) The Invention of Heterosexuality and
Jenny Hockey, Angela Meah, and Victoria Robinson (2007) Mundane
Heterosexualities.
26 This helps explain Franz Fanon’s famous argument in The Wretched of the
Earth (1967) that decolonisation is always inevitably violent.
27 See Gregory Elliott (1994) Althusser: A Critical Reader for a collection of
applications and criticisms of Althusser’s work. In this book, I am merely
drawing from the model of overt and covert force offered by Althusser’s idea
of the State Apparatuses.
2 Amnesia and Awakening in
Four Melodramas

‘Lest We Forget’: National Memories and Collective

Oblivions
The spring leading up to the 70th anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE)
Day on 8 May 2015 was filled with events, ranging from commemo-
rative church services to events such as the jubilee ‘Silver Poppy Golf’
tournament organised in St Andrews, Scotland (Legion S­ cotland 2015).
In typical age of technology fashion, social media was also flooded
with Kipling quotations and poppies, along with a few pacifist, anti-­
commemoration articles and blog posts that were quickly drowned by
images of even more poppies. The elaborate collective remembering of
the end of the Second World War in 21st-century Britain, where per-
sonal memories of it retreat further into the past as the number of
witnesses decreases, serves as a case in point of how crucial collective
memories are for ­nations. Anthony D. Smith has insisted that the sur-
vival of ­national communities relies on ‘memories, symbols, myths and
traditions’ persevering as a source of identification for ‘successive gen-
erations’ (1999: 128). Smith goes on succinctly to define the nation as
‘a named social group, with common historical memories and mass
culture, occupying an historic territory or homeland, and possessing
a single division of labour and common legal rights and duties for all
members’ (1999: 189). Both historic territory and historical memories
are routinely naturalised in national discourse, and the historical past
is often viewed as neutral, as merely a sequence of facts and events that
are represented. However, as Jen Harvie suggests, national identities are
creatively ‘produced’ and ‘staged’, which involves an extensive cultural
network of remembering and forgetting (2005: 2).1 In the view of both
Smith and Harvie, national memories are fictions as much as they are
facts, and these cultural memories of a nation are not homogenous or
static but always in flux. National memory is thus by definition selective.
The selective nature of national memories negates any possibility
of neutral official histories or indeed any idea of ‘naturally’ emerged
nations. Ernest Gellner has famously asserted that nations are ‘deter-
mined slumberers’, only some of which ‘awoke’, implying that a certain
28 Amnesia and Awakening in Four Melodramas
arbitrariness is involved in the construction of nations – a notion that
would undoubtedly be abhorred by many theorists of the perennial
school that view the nation as a natural phenomenon (2006: 40). The
‘awakening’ of nations has been traced back to the emergence of mo-
dernity by modernist critics of nationalities. David Gross suggests that
nation states, in part, determine ‘which collective memories are relevant
and worth encouraging’ (1985: 67). The selective memory of nation
states, according to Gross, coincided with modernity, put into motion
by the Industrial Revolution and further cultivated in the 19th century
(65). History and its selective, collective memories – partially managed
by nation states – are habitually portrayed as the source of ‘official mem-
ory’. As outlined in the Introduction of this book, cinematic realism is
often aligned with such official memories and histories. M ­ elodrama, by
contrast, is often shunned for its blatant neglect of authorised history
and its false presentations of historical ‘truths’. Unquestionably, then,
the interaction between melodrama and history is problematic to say
the least. Gainsborough melodrama as a genre is, in fact, something
of an amnesiac in itself: picking and choosing historical detail often
to an eccentric extent. Pam Cook is right to claim that the notion of
‘history itself as truth’ is outrageously ridiculed in the Gainsborough
cycle (1996a: 8), and indeed, as she argues elsewhere, these films have
a ‘contradictory’ relationship to British social history (1983: 24). Sue
Harper has further suggested that Gainsborough melodramas present
‘the historical past as a site of sensual pleasure’ (1987: 181). The antith-
esis between ‘factual’ realism and pleasurable melodrama is markedly
gendered, aligning official history with masculine rationality and the
realm of ‘truth’ and the real, and melodramatic presentations of the
past with irrational, emotional femininity and fantasy. Such antithet-
ical positioning of melodrama and official history, however, is rather
misleading. Landy has pointed out how official histories and melo-
drama, in fact, share modes of presentation and points of focus rather
than being fundamentally antithetical. Landy goes so far as to argue
that ‘elite historical representations, especially monumental narratives
of national formation, are saturated with melodrama’ (1996: 42, my
emphasis). This conceptualisation of canonical, masculine history as
melodramatic deconstructs the gendered binarism of ‘real’ as ‘male’ and
‘fantasy’ as ‘female’. For Landy, the resemblance of monumental his-
tory and melodrama is rooted in their mutual ‘fascination with power,
­violence, and fanaticism’ (1996: 18). 2 Monumental histories, Landy
argues, share melodramas’ preoccupation with ‘threats to national
­continuity, ­i nevitably involving scenarios of physical and spiritual
struggle; of personal, familial and group sacrifice; of patriotism; and
of an intense and excessive concentration on belonging and exclusion’
(1996: 17). Melodrama is, arguably then, somewhat paradoxically, at
 Amnesia and Awakening in Four Melodramas 29
the heart of national memory and nationality, contrary to what official
historical presentations would have us think.
British cinema of the late 1940s and early 1950s often turned to the
theme of amnesia to explore questions of identity. This is especially
the case with melodrama, which Peter Brooks suggests ‘constantly re-
minds us of the psychoanalytic concept of “acting out”: the use of the
body ­itself, its actions, gestures, its sites of irritation and excitation’
(1994: 19). Indeed, melodrama seems preoccupied with the psychosex-
ual past and the relationship between the desiring body and the mind
traumatised by the past. In post-war cinema, the theme of amnesia –
­often combined with plots involving split personalities – allows for room
to explore the flexibility of both body and mind, and the potential of
bodies to manifest and ‘act out’ different, often conflicting identities.
The proliferation of films with protagonists suffering from amnesia in
British cinema reached its zenith in 1945 and 1946, immediately after
the end of the war, perhaps unsurprisingly since the displacement of
identity, alienation from the self, and detachment from homeland and
domestic attachments were common themes of the war experience. The
war, Alan Allport suggests, ‘had broken up the family unit, scattered
men and women far and wide, and introduced the lonely, vulnerable and
curious to new temptations’ (2009: 80). The theme of amnesia in many
of the films of the post-war period allows for explorations of forgetting
the self and flirting with such ‘temptations’ as well as other potential
identities and sexual attachments, unimaginable in the realm of realist
cinema or the depiction of both male and female sexuality in war pro-
paganda and the press.
This chapter focusses on four films from the immediate post-war period,
all of which feature protagonists suffering from amnesia of some kind.
The first half of the chapter looks at two ‘male’ melodramas, Caravan
(Arthur Crabtree 1946) and The October Man (Roy Ward Baker 1947),
while the second half turns to two ‘female’ melodramas, Madonna of the
Seven Moons (Arthur Crabtree 1945) and The Seventh Veil (Compton
Bennett 1945). The narratives of amnesia and awakening in these films
are simultaneously the source of guilty pleasure, as in Caravan – and to
a lesser extent Madonna of the Seven Moons – and disturbing anxiety,
the source of which often remains complex and ambiguous, as in The
October Man and The Seventh Veil. In this sense, during the post-war
period memories and experiences of the war were problematic in that the
war had ended, yet its psychological and emotional impacts were still
very much present, both in individual minds and cultural representations.
In fact, the post-war period as a whole, as Plain argues, is ‘a beginning
rooted, psychologically, in the impossibility of an ending’ (2013: 144). In
this paradoxical cultural context, cultural memory and forgetting was a
resonant theme, which is reflected in the cinema of the period.
30 Amnesia and Awakening in Four Melodramas
Male Amnesiacs in Caravan and The October Man
Arthur Crabtree’s Gainsborough melodrama Caravan (1946) is set in
late 19th-century England and Spain, and the film follows the epic jour-
ney of its writer-fighter protagonist, Richard Darrell (Stewart Granger). 3
The film opens as Richard saves a man on the street from robbers. He
accidentally leaves a draft that he is working on with the man, a Spanish
jewellery broker, Don Carlos (Gerard Heinz). Richard tells Don Carlos
his life story: the son of an English father and a Spanish mother, he was
raised among the gypsies. In his childhood, he made friends with two
upper-class children, Oriana Camperdene (Anne Crawford) and ­Francis
Castleton (Dennis Price). Oriana and Richard fall in love, leaving
­R ichard’s rival Francis disappointed. In the same vein as Granger’s char-
acter in The Magic Bow (1946), discussed in the next chapter, Richard
has to make a name for himself and make his fortune before he can move
up the social ladder and marry Oriana. Richard thus sets out to take
a valuable necklace to Spain on behalf of Don Carlos, leaving his new
fiancée behind with Francis. In Spain, Richard meets a gypsy dancer,
Rosal (Jean Kent), who becomes infatuated with him. Richard is robbed
and assaulted by Wycroft (Robert Helpmann), who is hired by Francis.
Rosal takes the injured Richard to the cave she lives in and nurses him.
Richard suffers from memory loss, and thanks to his amnesia, Rosal
convinces him that they are in love. Meanwhile, thinking Richard is
dead, Oriana marries Francis. When Richard recovers his memory and
finds out about the marriage, he decides to marry Rosal. In the ending,
Rosal dies from a bullet aimed at Richard, Francis is killed by drowning
in quicksand, and Richard and Oriana finally return to the pastoral idyll
of their native England to resume their life together.
Released in 1946, Caravan marks Gainsborough’s attempt to cater to
the male audiences returning from the war, with a shift from the earlier
melodramas’ female protagonists to leading males and their points of view.
As Andrew Spicer has insisted, Caravan’s ‘interest in male psychology and
its amnesiac narrative could also have provided an identificatory space for
male viewers, now returned from their own wartime sojourns and possible
infidelities’ (2003: 66). While this shift in presumed audience perspective
was unsuccessful and marked a turn towards the f­ ading of the cycle after
the war, the presentation of male protagonists in the later ­Gainsborough
melodramas – and in Caravan in particular – is a valuable point of com-
parison to the female melodramas that dominate ­Gainsborough’s earlier
repertoire. The narrative of male amnesia in ­Caravan is decisively differ-
ent from the female amnesiac narratives in melodramas such as ­Madonna
of the Seven Moons and The Seventh Veil, discussed in the next sec-
tion, Richard’s amnesia is distinctly physical in nature, caused by being
­physically assaulted and sustaining a head injury, whereas the female pro-
tagonists who suffer from amnesia are most often labelled as hysterics
 Amnesia and Awakening in Four Melodramas 31
or madwomen experiencing psychosexual trauma. David Buchbinder, a
theorist of masculinities, insists that in our culture ‘men are not supposed
to exhibit emotional upset or psychological ­disorder; but when they do,
the fault is around them, not in them’ (1994: 10, original emphasis). In
cultural representations of women’s ­psychological disorders, by contrast,
the fault often is very specifically in them.
There is moreover a notion of freedom of movement between spaces
and identities in the amnesiac narrative in Caravan, which comes with
the physical nature and external cause of the protagonist’s condition.
This sense of freedom is largely missing from the female amnesiac nar-
ratives, in which deviating from the nationally legitimate performance
of femininity is lethal. Richard/Don Ricardo is, first, both a physical
and intellectual character – a combination that fits rather clumsily in
Stewart Granger’s 40s star persona as a heart-throb. Richard tells Don
Carlos that he is ‘a writer […] not a bruiser’ to which Don Carlos re-
plies, ‘I think you’re a bit of both’. Spicer has posited that Richard is ‘a
hybrid figure, combining the bourgeois respectability and work ethic of
his father, an altruistic English doctor, and the Mediterranean ­sensuality
of his ­Spanish mother’ (2003: 66). While such separate, or divided, na-
tional identities can successfully be reconciled in Richard’s male body,
when such a union of contradictions is presented in a female body, as
in Madonna of the Seven Moons, the only outcome seems to be death.
This, however, is not the case with Richard, and the character’s amalga-
mation of ‘foreign’ sensuality and ‘domestic’ rationality is presented as
desirable and sustainable. This difference in gendered representation of
corporeality portrays the female body as a porous, national, and ideo-
logical space; once it has been contaminated, it is beyond redemption.
Granger’s performance as Richard/Don Ricardo furthermore combines
masculinity and femininity, which was reflected in the promotional ma-
terial for the film in curiously material markers of gender. There were
two posters of the film circulating at the time of its release: one dis-
played Granger in a hypermasculine image, topless and in a vigorous
pose shot from a low angle, with a whip in hand, wearing boots and
trousers, while the other showed the leading star as strikingly femi-
nine, ‘ear-ringed, curled and lipsticked, and bearing a startling likeness
to Valentino’ (Harper 1983: 48). This combination of masculinity and
femininity is not unusual for Gainsborough, but neither is it entirely
unproblematic in the film, as we shall see in the analysis in this chapter.
As several masculinity theorists have maintained, masculinity is estab-
lished by repudiating the feminine: for instance Jeffrey Weeks insists that
‘[m]en are socialised in our society by being taught they are not women’
(1983: 5). Anthony Easthope, by the same token, posits that masculinity
is ‘defined mainly in the way the individual deals with his femininity’
(1990: 6). Sustaining both masculine and feminine aspects in a male
heroic figure is consequently inevitably complicated.
32 Amnesia and Awakening in Four Melodramas
In the gendered, split symbolism of the film, maternal warmth and
physical sensuality are attached to Spain, while language, writing, and
reason are reserved for Richard’s paternal England. This antithesis be-
tween intellectual and corporeal existence is made explicit in Rosal’s
character in particular; immediately after the assault, when Richard is
suffering from amnesia, she urges him ‘not to think’. Arguably, C ­ aravan
can be read as a melodramatic and ironic Odyssey, with Richard/Don
Ricardo as the epic hero far removed from his distant homeland, do-
mestic duties, and homely sexual commitments; Rosal thus becomes
Calypso and her cave a melodramatic version of Ogygia. The potential
allusion, or at the very least light-hearted reference, to The Odyssey sit-
uates the narrative of Richard’s displaced, forgotten, and hidden identity
in the long tradition of canonical heroes, such as Odysseus and Oedipus,
who are temporarily displaced from their homelands. The connotations
evoked of The Odyssey therefore imply that the protagonist’s displace-
ment is temporary, and he is not a nationless subject but has an ‘authen-
tic’ home to which he shall return in due course. Tamar Mayer maintains
that ‘when nation, gender and sexuality intersect, the body becomes an
important marker – even a boundary – for the nation’ (2000: 17–18).
This is often especially true of epic narratives in which the epic hero’s
female lover and her body come to epitomise national territory. In the
melodramatic epic scenario in Caravan, Oriana’s body, like Penelope’s
body in The Odyssey, can be read to embody such territory. The ag-
gressive ‘false’ suitor Francis threatens both Richard’s position as the
national subject and Oriana’s integrity as the symbolic homeland that
Richard has to save; at the same time, Richard’s sexual and national in-
tegrity is at stake. Rosal, on the contrary, is a dangerous foreign woman
luring Richard into temptation. In wartime and post-war cinema, as
Christine Geraghty suggests, ‘the European woman became a site of
fantasy about sexual possibilities but [she] also provides a metaphor for
Britain’s relationship with Europe at the point when Cold War attitudes
and boundaries were being fixed into place’ (2000: 96). However, while
Rosal can be read in this context as such a European woman, she is also,
perhaps more importantly, characterised as a transnational gypsy and is
therefore a more ambiguous figure.
The Odyssey narrative, and the notion of a permanent homeland
evoked through it, is consequently undercut by another myth in the
film: that of the gypsy. The gypsy, whose identity is based on nomad-
ism and myth, and who lacks any stable national identity, is central
to the ­Gainsborough character stock, and it contributes to the films’
often elusive and flamboyant portrayal of nationalities.4 The fact that
­Gainsborough melodramas should so often turn to the figure of the
gypsy seems symptomatic of the collective trauma of wartime that dis-
placed people from homes and homelands, and often generated ideals of
national identity and sexuality. The gypsy Rosal, who lacks any stable
national identity, unsettles Richard’s binary nationality divided between
 Amnesia and Awakening in Four Melodramas 33
his English father and Spanish mother, and provides an alternative mode
of subjectivity outside the paradigms of nationality. Rosal’s world is gov-
erned by sensuality and corporeality rather than national loyalties and
duties. Both Rosal and Richard are associated with the natural world,
with physicality and sensuality. Richard tells Don Carlos of his child-
hood and how he learned the macho sport of boxing from the gypsies:
‘As a boy, I ran wild, spending most of my time with the gypsies. They
taught me to ride, to cook gypsy-fashion. […] And, incidentally, to fight.
[…] In order to live with those gypsy lads, I had to use my knuckles’.5
Richard enjoys adventure, and even though throughout the narrative, we
know he is destined for a life with Oriana, who, in Richard’s own words,
‘would be the one woman in the world’ for him, there is a definite, irre-
sistible appeal to Rosal and the realm of the sensual that she epitomises.6
Landy has rightly insisted that even though Gainsborough melodramas
tend to position the viewer to side with the ‘conventional’ lovers who
are destined for marriage, ‘the intensity in the narrative derives from the
characters who are marked for destruction’ (1991: 218). In Caravan, the
sympathy for Rosal is especially evoked by her counter-normativity and
her identity uninhibited by social norms and restrictions. When Richard
asks Rosal which part of Spain she comes from, she asserts that she
comes ‘from the rocks, under the stars […] My people are the Usari, the
people of the bear. I have my cave at Granada, but dancing feet carry a
girl everywhere’.
If Richard in Caravan seems at home in the Spanish landscape coded
as ‘exotic’ – and personified in Rosal’s othered body – and his natural
habitat is the natural world, Francis’s milieu is his grand stone mansion
in which Oriana too resides. Both Dennis Price’s performance of comic
malice and the character’s wardrobe of impeccable top hats and stiff col-
lars suggest immobility. Unlike the benevolent, democratic aristocracy
of Ralph Skelton in The Wicked Lady, discussed in the next chapter,
Francis is cruel, malevolent, and dishonest as well as clearly outdated in
his aristocratic attitudes. While Richard is a man of action, Francis only
schemes and leaves all the dirty work to his sidekick, Wycroft. In their
rivalry for Oriana, Richard’s strengths from the beginning are his phys-
icality and integrity, whereas Francis’s – morally questionable – forte
is deception. Price’s performance as the evil Francis is highly absurd;
even his death in quicksand is kept lightly tragicomic, with his exagger-
ated expressions and gestures.7 Price’s character lacks the sexual appeal
of Mason’s roles as brutal, Byronic aristocrats, and he is presented as
the unattractive and morally corrupt ‘false’ lover for Oriana. After he
thinks he has successfully had Richard murdered, he reads a fake letter
to Oriana declaring Richard’s death. In the scene Oriana’s dress is mag-
nificent, with a wide round hem, evoking connotations of a fortress and
reinforcing her portrayal as a territory belonging to Richard that Frances
tries to conquer.8 After their marriage, Francis becomes cruel towards
Oriana, constantly threatening her with sexual violence in the exchanges
34 Amnesia and Awakening in Four Melodramas
between the two: ‘Pretty lips are made to be kissed; a truth you’re yet to
learn! I see I must find some way to instruct you in your wifely duties’.
As if in a fairy tale, Oriana avoids Francis’s sexual advances and thus
remains a ‘pure’, untainted national territory for Richard to reclaim.
However, even though the sterile and immobile milieu of Francis is
ridiculed in the film, Richard’s foreign lover Rosal and the carnal ­Spanish
landscape are not presented as unequivocally positive either. On the one
hand, Wycroft’s description of Spain accentuates pleasurable sensuality
and escapist ‘exoticism’: he says that ‘one might imagine oneself in para-
dise’ and that ‘there’s a fiesta every day’. Richard is equally fascinated by
Rosal’s ‘otherness’ and ‘exoticism’, and says that he has ‘never seen such
dancing as [hers]’. Nevertheless, there is a sense of disorder, instability,
and even unpleasant exoticism attached to the Spanish landscape of sen-
suality, and Wycroft points out that the sense of paradise is only disturbed
by ‘the smells’, while Richard describes Rosal as ‘uncomfortably pretty’
and ‘a very disturbing young lady’. Crabtree further uses some awkward
camera angles to portray Rosal’s dancing body and her grinning face as
she performs, which adds an element of grotesque to the characterisation
of her ethnically and culturally othered sensuality. The disturbing and
‘uncomfortable’ element to Rosal’s characterisation has to do with per-
haps both a fear of female sexuality and fear of the feminine per se. That
is, Richard’s return to his mother’s native Spain marks a shift to the femi-
nine, and his retreat into Rosal’s cave marks a symbolic regression into the
pre-Oedipal maternal sphere in which ‘life stand[s] still’. Rosal nurses but
also nurtures and mothers Richard by dressing him up in gypsy costume
as if he were a child, and even the language she uses is maternal: ‘Now
you’ll look like a real gypsy!’ In addition to urging him not to think, from
their first exchange, Rosal tempts Richard to forget: ‘Am I […] pretty
[…] in the sort of way that makes you feel… for an hour, like you could
forget [Oriana]?’ When Richard is assaulted, he does indeed temporarily
forget Oriana, as Rosal has earlier so unabashedly suggested, as well as
himself and his social role. When he is injured, R ­ osal’s voice calling out
his name is echoed melodically and phantasmically in the mountains as
if a sirens’ song – again invoking connotations to The Odyssey. Rosal at-
tempts, and ultimately fails to, obliterate ­Richard’s past, his history, and
his connection with his homeland and Oriana, which is conveyed in her
perpetual use of the present tense, which also functions as a marker of
her foreignness: ‘I nurse you back to life’. She renames Richard by giving
him a new Spanish version of his original English name and calls him
‘Don Ricardo’, around which she establishes the story of his new identity.
However, Richard is not entirely convinced:

RICHARD: I still can’t quite remember. […] Who am I… Where did I come
from… Where was I going… I can’t even remember my own name.
ROSAL: Ricardo. That is your name – Ricardo. […]
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river. There was a bumper crop, and the price of transport is heavy.
Finally he succeeded in securing the boat in which he and his family
had come up earlier in the season. The bargain was made for sixty-
two dollars for the trip, with a bonus of two extra at the end, if we
were satisfied. There were to be four rowers, but they didn’t keep to
the agreement. They wanted to have military escort in addition,
which we declined on account of the limited deck space in which
they and the owners have to live.
The accommodation of a river-boat is small: ours consisted of
three tiny compartments, of which we took two, finding that our beds
occupied exactly half the space, with a well between them, and our
chairs and table the remainder. The cooking was done in a sort of
well in the small deck in front of us, and it was a great satisfaction to
watch the way in which it was done by Yao and his meticulous
cleanliness. There was no lack of water, so each vegetable was
washed in clean water about five or six times. I believe the correct
number of times to wash rice before cooking is ten. It was really
astonishing to see the dishes Yao prepared on the handful of
charcoal which was used to cook not only our meals but also those
of the crew.
The scenery was very wild and beautiful, and on the whole our
crew rowed well. There was an engaging little girl of three years old,
who amused us not a little with her clever manipulation of the
chopsticks, never dropping a grain of rice: she wore two silver
bangles and two rings. Each night we moored by the bank in what
was considered a safe place, for the robbers were much dreaded by
the crew. Our live stock—chickens and ducks—were tethered out to
graze. At one place they took on a couple of unarmed police,
unknown to us, but as they would have been no use whatever had
we been attacked, I ordered them to be put ashore at the next town.
The robbers had burned many villages, we were told, driving off the
cattle, killing some of the inhabitants, and looting all that was of
value to them. All the way we passed shrines dotted along the river-
bank—one hideous fat Buddha was painted on the rock—and
incense was burnt continually by the owners of the boat. The quality
of their zeal varied relatively to the danger incurred, so we had no
need to make inquiry. At the worst part of all we had to support the
courage of the crew by a pork feast, portions of which were flung into
the air and caught by wicked-looking crows, which hovered
screaming overhead. These crows are looked upon as evil spirits of
the river needing to be propitiated.
The first important town we reached in Hunan was Yuan Chowfu,
and we found there some missionaries of the China Inland Mission
who had many interesting experiences to tell of revolutionary days.
Hunan has always been a particularly anti-foreign province, and
work has progressed slowly: it is not at all surprising that the people
should be slow to understand the object of foreigners coming to
settle among them, and every one mistrusts what they do not
understand. It needs something to break down prejudice, and in this
case the something was of a tragic nature. The missionary came
home one day to find his wife lying in the veranda with a fractured
skull and brain exposed to view: she had been attacked by a
madman, who left her for dead. It was long before she was nursed
back to a certain measure of health, with speech and memory gone.
This happened two years ago, and now she is slowly regaining
strength and her lost powers, and welcomed us with exquisite
hospitality; despite having an attack of fever, she insisted on our
staying to tea and the evening meal. Mr. and Mrs. Becker have the
supreme satisfaction of finding that from the time of the accident
their work has taken on a wholly different complexion; the people
have rallied round them and look to them for support in troublous
times. With but slight medical training Mr. Becker organized Red
Cross classes, and took charge of the wounded in the mission
premises. At one time the city was threatened by revolutionaries, the
officials lost control, and for three days he took full command and
saved the situation. He received medals and a complimentary board
from the Government, acknowledging the great services he had
rendered to Yuan Chow.
No less than nine times Mr. Becker has been caught by robbers,
but has never had a single thing stolen by them, which certainly
constitutes a record. When a pistol was put to his head, he
presented a visiting card, saying, “Take this to your Chief”: it is a fine
example of “a soft answer turneth away wrath.” On recognizing who
he is, they have always released him without any injury. He told us
that recently the robber bands have been broken up, and thought we
need have no anxiety about them. We were regaled with the first
strawberries of the season from their garden, which contained a
promising supply of vegetables, and there were goats and kids in
pens. We went away loaded with good things, and deeply impressed
by the sight of these heroic workers and their colleagues.
The principal industry of the place is white wax: special ash trees
grow here on which the insects live, but every year the insects
necessary to produce the wax have to be brought from the
neighbouring province of Szechwan. “When they reach the right
stage of development they are put in paper boxes, in bamboo trays,
and carried by the swiftest runners. These men only travel by night,
as it is essential that the process of development should not proceed
too rapidly. The boxes have to be opened every day and ventilated,
and the men secure the best rooms in the inns, so that other
travellers have to suffer if they are on the road at the same time”
(Face of China, p. 183). There were also large numbers of paulownia
trees, with their lilac flowers in full bloom: they produce a vegetable
oil used for cooking and for furniture. All this district is noted for its
trees, and much wood is brought down by a tributary river from the
Panghai district, where it is cut down by the Black Miao tribe.
The next town where we halted was particularly attractive,
surrounded by red sandstone walls and grey stone battlements. We
made a complete tour on the top of the city wall, but the houses are
so high that you cannot see into any of the courtyards. At one point
there was a fine, picturesque group of trees overhanging the wall,
otherwise the houses were built very close together, like a rabbit
warren. On the battlements were a number of most comical little
guns, some carefully protected from the weather by shrines built
over them. They looked as if they might have come out of the ark,
but were only about seventy years old, some being dated.
In the market we bought wild raspberries, which had quite a good
flavour when cooked, but they were rather tart, as they were not fully
ripe. We found wild strawberries by the wayside, but were told that
some varieties are poisonous, and those we ate were quite
tasteless.
Our next halting-place was Hong Kiang, where we arrived at 8.30
a.m., and spent a pleasant day with two missionary families, one
being a doctor’s. He was rather depressed, because the town is
under the control of a military governor of irascible temper. The
doctor’s cook had recently been suffering from insanity and was
being treated in the hospital, when he was suddenly seized and
condemned to death. The doctor, on hearing of it, went instantly to
the Governor to explain matters, but he pleaded in vain, and found
the man had been shot while he was with the Governor. Executions
are continually taking place, and so badly done that frequently the
offenders linger wounded for hours after they have been shot. Often
the doctor is begged to go and help, but what can he do? On
occasion he has been allowed to go and bring them back to life! In
one case he had taken stretchers on which to bring the sufferers
back to the hospital, but they were one too few, so that he told one
man he would come back for him. The man dare not wait for his
return, and managed, despite being in a terrible condition, to drag
himself to the hospital on foot.
Mr. Hollenwenger took us up a high hill behind the city to see the
view, and it was certainly worth while, although the heat was great.
The river winds round a long strip of land, and a narrow stream
across it could easily be made navigable so as to save the junks
having to make a detour of several miles. Another big tributary joins
the river almost opposite the stream, by which quantities of wood are
brought down from the hills. The valley is full of ricefields, and we
saw men transplanting the rice with incredible rapidity from the small
field in which it is originally raised to the larger fields where it attains
maturity.
When we got back to lunch we found Dr. Witt had to go at once to
an ambulance class, which the Governor had requested him to
undertake in view of the troops being sent to fight in the struggle now
going on between North and South. In various parts of the country
we found missionaries being used by the authorities in this way. At
the time that China joined the Allies during the war they told the
German missionaries to leave the country, but exceptions were
made in the case of many like these, whose work was felt to justify
their remaining.
The next town of importance that we reached was Shen Chowfu,
where there is quite a large group of American missionaries with
hospitals, schools, etc., whom we had been asked to visit. Their
buildings stood up conspicuously at both ends of the long river-front
of the city. We were told that the hospital had been built with
indemnity money paid by the Chinese Government on account of the
murder of C.I.M. missionaries many years ago, but which the C.I.M.
declined to accept. It is a well-known fact that such money never
comes from the guilty parties, but is extorted from the people, and
consequently is always a source of ill-will. We were told by some
charming American ladies there, how bitter the feeling had been
against them, and that for years they were guarded by soldiery and
never left their houses unaccompanied by a guard. They had
spacious gardens, and the missionaries’ families lived there without
ever going into the streets. It seemed a strange kind of existence,
and brought home to us acutely the question of mission policy. There
seem to me to be two classes of American missionary ideals—
roughly speaking—one of which is responsible for some of the finest
work possible in China and which every one must heartily admire;
such work may be seen at St. John’s University, Shanghai, and in
the American Board at Peking. But there is another increasingly
large class whose faith seems to be pinned on a strange trinity—
money, organization, and Americanization. The first necessity for
them is large and showy buildings, generally apart from the busy city
life, or at least on the outskirts of the city—this may be all right in the
case of boarding-schools, but for hospitals it renders them practically
useless. I have seen groups of residential premises miles away from
the work. The welfare of the missionaries is the foremost
consideration. The means of transport are slow, so that hours must
be spent every day by the workers getting to and from their work,
and they live a life wholly apart from the Chinese. The work is highly
organized, and they have much larger staffs than our missions
provide, as they seem to have unlimited means and men.
Undoubtedly we err grievously in the opposite direction: our
missionaries have all far more work than they can perform. Added to
that, our missionaries have about one-third of the holiday that the
Americans do and less money to make the holiday a real one. Our
societies are all hard hit by the question of finance, but it would be
better to cut down our work rather than spoil its quality by insufficient
staffing and underpay.
The third point is Americanization. A large section of missionaries
so value their own culture that they believe they can do no better
than try and denationalize the Chinese, or Indians, or whatever other
nations they may be working amongst, and transform them into
Americans. In the case of China this seems to me a most disastrous
policy, and founded on serious error. The Chinese and British
characteristic of reserve which we consider a quality they consider a
defect, and believe that familiarity breeds not contempt but
friendship. The breaking down of the reserve in the Chinese
character is only too frequently a breaking down also of moral
barriers—a disintegration of character, and opposed to the genius of
the race. The Chinese student returning from the United States is
often completely spoiled by having cast off the charming old-time
manners of his own country in favour of the hail-fellow-well-met
manners of young America. He cannot be accepted into a European
or Chinese household on his return without taking what seems to
them unwarrantable liberties, while he himself is sublimely
unconscious of the effect produced. In the same way in mission
schools the students are encouraged to familiarity with their teachers
—as for instance in the case of mixed bathing in summer resorts.
The teacher and the taught are all put on the same level, and the
respect which we have been taught to consider due to age and
learning, ceases to exist. “Manners maketh man,” and the difference
in manners is one of the greatest bars to united work, which
Christians of all denominations are trying so hard to build up in China
at the present day.
To return to our brief stay at Shen Chow. It seemed an interesting
place with fine large shops, and we should like to have made closer
acquaintance with them. However, our boatman, who always wanted
to loiter where there was nothing to be seen, showed a sudden
determination that we should leave the town before sundown and
reach a certain safe spot to spend the night. As we were always
urging him to hurry, we felt obliged to give in, and reluctantly went on
board. The Standard Oil Co. is very energetic there, and has a large
advertisement, happily in Chinese characters, which are not
aggressively ugly (like our Western advertisements) all along the
river-front, the last thing we saw as we floated down stream.
Next day we shot the big rapid, and much incense and paper was
burnt to ensure our safety. Rain fell heavily in the evening, as it had
so often done during our journey. Before stopping for the night we
came to a custom-house, where our boat was thoroughly searched
for opium. It meant that at last we were come to a place where
opium was strictly forbidden, namely into the territory under General
Feng’s jurisdiction. The Customs officers, however, were most
courteous, though thorough, and I believe would have taken our
word with regard to our personal belongings, but I preferred that they
should see we were quite willing to be examined.
At midday on the morrow we reached Changteh, and walked
through wet slippery streets a long way till we came to the C.I.M.
house. Mr. and Mrs. Bannan received us most cordially and invited
us to be their guests, as Mr. Locke (who had invited us when we
were at Shanghai) had been transferred to a school five miles down
the river and was sure we should prefer to be in the city. This was
much more convenient, and we found a week only far too short to
see all the interesting things. We spent a couple of nights at the
school with Mr. and Mrs. Locke, and took part in a Christian
Endeavour meeting. This movement has proved very successful in
some parts of China, especially for training the women and girls to
take active part in evangelization. We went down the river in a
minute motor launch, which was very handy, especially as we had to
leave at an early hour to call on General Feng. I leave to another
chapter an account of him and the city, which so obviously bore his
impress when we were there. The level of Changteh is below the
river-level sometimes to the extent of fifteen feet; then the city gates
have to be sandbagged to keep the water out.
 From Changteh we went by passenger boat to Changsha, and had
two little cabins which we converted into one for the voyage. The
whole of the roof was covered with third-class passengers and their
belongings; at night they spread their bedding, and in the daytime
squatted about or wandered round the very narrow gangway outside
the cabins, a proceeding which left us in a darkened condition. Yao
managed to prepare us savoury meals in some minute nook, having
brought the necessary stores and a tiny stove on which to cook
them. The day after leaving Changteh we crossed the wonderful lake
of Tong Ting, a lake more than two thousand square miles in extent
during the summer, and non-existent in winter. This strange and
unique phenomenon is due to an overflow of the Yangtze, and in the
summer there is a regular steamship service across the lake,
connecting Changsha with Hankow, two hundred and twenty-two
miles distant, by the river Siang and a tributary of the Yangtze.
Eventually they will be connected by a railway, which is to run from
Hankow to Canton, and of which the southern part is already in
existence—and also a short section from Changsha to Chuchow;
this is only thirty-eight miles and is mainly valuable on account of its
connexion with a branch line to the Ping Siang collieries.
Changsha is an important city, the capital of Hunan. It is large and
clean, the centre of considerable trade, and one of the newest treaty
ports, opened in 1904. The variety of its exports is interesting: rice,
tea, paper, tobacco, lacquer, cotton-cloth, hemp, paulownia oil,
earthenware, timber, coal, iron and antimony. I was anxious to buy
some of the beautiful grass cloth for which it is noted, and was taken
by a friend to some of the big shops, but found them busily packing
up all their goods, in case their shops should be looted by the
approaching Southern troops. Such doings are by no means
uncommon, and all Americans and Europeans seemed to take it as
a matter of course. Arrangements were being made to receive
terrified refugees into mission premises, and the Red Cross was
extremely busy preparing for the wounded. The rumours as to the
Governor fleeing varied from hour to hour, and it soon became plain
that the city would be undefended. Our kind American hosts, Mr. and
Mrs. Lingle, were having little Red Cross flags made to put up as
signals on places of refuge, and he came in to tell us how the tailor
who was making them had just appealed to him for help: a retreating
soldier thought to make hay while the sun shone, and was taking
possession of the sewing-machine, demanding that it should be
carried away for him by the tailor’s assistant. Mr. Lingle also
prevented another sewing-machine being stolen: evidently they were
in great request.
No more striking proof could be seen of the progress of
Christianity in China than the difference of attitude shown towards
missions in time of danger and difficulty. When I first visited China a
mission station was the most dangerous place to live in; now it is the
place of safety par excellence, to which all the Chinese flock when
they are in danger. An interesting illustration of this took place last
year. In a certain district in Shensi a notorious band of robbers came
to a Baptist Missionary and a Roman Catholic priest, and promised
to save the town where they were working if they would procure for
them six rifles. They succeeded in getting the rifles, and took them to
the brigands. When they attempted to use them, the brigands found
they had been tampered with, and decided to loot the town in
consequence. They respected, however, their promise to the men
who had brought them, evidently believing in their good faith, and
said they would spare all the Christians. The problem was how to
recognize them, for at once there were a large number who claimed
to be Christians. The robbers decided by looking at them who was
genuine and who was not. In cases of uncertainty they appealed to
the missionaries, who assure us that they had proved quite accurate
in their judgment. Christianity ought to mould the expression of a
face.
There are many missions of various nationalities at Changsha,
and all seemed extremely prosperous, most of them in large and
handsome buildings. The girls’ school, of which our hostess was the
head, stood in spacious grounds outside the city wall, and near it is
the imposing pile of the Yale mission buildings. The mission started
in 1905 when Dr. Gaze began the medical work, a hospital was
opened in 1908, and the first students graduated in 1912: it is
essentially a medical school, and differs from others as regards the
staff in having short course men sent out from Yale University as
volunteers. They are not necessarily missionaries. There are fine
laboratories for research work, a large new building for science
students, splendid up-to-date equipment in all branches of medical
and surgical work, schools for male and female nurses, beautiful
houses for the large staff of professors, library, a really beautiful
chapel, lecture rooms, dormitories, playing grounds, tennis courts; in
fact everything that can be desired on the most lavish scale, the
greatest conceivable contrast to every other mission I have seen in
China. There is a special ward for Europeans. The new Rockefeller
hospital in Peking is to outshine it in beauty, I believe, but will find it
difficult to equal it in all-round equipment, and of course will lack the
acreage, which makes many things possible in Changsha which are
impossible in Peking. “The Hunan Provincial Government has met all
the local expenses of the College of Medicine and the Hospital for
the last six years.” The Rockefeller Foundation has provided funds
for salaries of additional medical staff, and Yale Foreign Missionary
Society academic teachers and a few of the medical staff. The fees
of the patients cover about half the running expenses of the hospital.
“The campus of Yale in China in the north suburb is on rising ground
between the railroad and the river, where its buildings are
conspicuous to travellers arriving by either train or steamer” (see
Yale College in China). The only drawback seems to be lack of
patients.
One of the finest pieces of mission work I saw was Dr. Keller’s
Bible School, which is supported by a Society in Los Angeles: it is for
the training of Chinese evangelists for all missionary societies, and
they divide the time of training between study and practical work.
They looked a fine body of men, and have been greatly appreciated
by the missionaries for whom they have worked. Application for their
help is made to the school, and they do not go unasked into any
district occupied by a society. When asked to conduct a mission, a
band of men is sent, and their modus operandi is as follows: they
make a map of the district, taking an area of about three square
miles—and after a day spent in prayer the men visit systematically
every house in that area and try to get on friendly terms with old and
young, giving them some portion of Scripture and inviting them to an
evening meeting. As soon as the people have become interested,
evening classes are started respectively for men, women, boys and
girls. The children are taught to sing, as they very quickly learn
hymns and like to practise the new art both early and late. The
special feature of their work is that they go as Friends to the people,
and as their own race; and it is to Chinese only that many Chinese
will listen. The character of many a village has been changed, the
missionaries say, by these national messengers, where they
themselves have been utterly unable to get a hearing. This is an
important feature of present-day missionary enterprise, and is the
link between the Past Phase of foreign evangelization and the Future
Phase of home Chinese mission work. Changsha is full of foreign
workers of many nationalities, but mainly American.
Dr. Keller’s work has been greatly strengthened in the eyes of the
Chinese by the noble example of his mother, whose spirit has
impressed them far more than any words could have done. When
her son was home for his last furlough, he felt that he could not leave
her alone, an old lady of eighty, recently widowed, and he decided to
give up his mission work for the time being. She would not agree to
this, but decided to go out with him and make her home in China for
the remainder of her life. Who can gauge the sacrifice of giving up
home and friends at such a time of life and going to an unknown land
where men spoke an unknown tongue? She had to undergo very
great hardships at first, and now after four years the solitude presses
heavily on her. At first she was able to read a great deal and lived in
her books; but she told us that now her sight is failing the time
seems very long.
We visited a Danish mission of some size, Norwegian Y.M.C.A.
workers, and a Russian lady in charge of a little blind school. She
had had no word from home for the last two years, but was pluckily
sticking to her task. The London Missionary Society has withdrawn
from work in Hunan, but the Wesleyan Mission has a high reputation
under the charge of Dr. Warren. He is one of the men who takes a
special interest in the political side of Chinese life, and gave me
much valuable information about the different parties. Just now the
changes going on are so rapid that anything one put down would be
out of date before it could be printed. The secret forces at work
keeping up hostility between North and South were everywhere
attributed to Japanese militarism: but it is only too obvious that the
present Government is not strong or patriotic enough to deal with the
situation. It is hard enough to carry on good government in so small
and stable a country as our own, so need we wonder at the inability
to transform the whole political and social system of the vastest
country in the world.
Meanwhile the civil war is a very curious one, and happily does not
cause the bloodshed one would expect, considering the forces
engaged. We had some talk with our British Consul about the
dangers of the road, as we wanted to go south to visit the sacred
mountain of Hengshan and thence to cross fine mountain passes
into the neighbouring province of Kwangshi. Mr. Giles told us that it
would be hopeless to attempt it, as an English steamer had been
fired on the day before in the very direction we must take. The
Northern and Southern troops were in active fighting, and every day
they were coming nearer to Changsha. The Governor would
probably desert the city when the Southern army had driven back the
Northern, and no one could say what would happen! After so
discouraging a report it may seem strange that Mr. Giles said there
was to be a reception at the Consulate next day, in honour of the
King’s birthday, to which he invited us.
War seemed infinitely remote from the charming gathering, where
all the foreign community met in the sunny garden on the river-bank.
English hospitality is very delightful so far away from home, and the
cordial spirit of the host and hostess lent a special attractiveness to
the occasion. I was particularly pleased to meet a Chinese friend
there, Miss Tseng, who invited us to visit her school next day. In
Chapter VIII I have tried to give an account of this famous scion of a
famous race.
With all the educational and religious and philanthropic institutions
to be visited, it was most difficult to find time to see the monuments
of the past, but we determined not to miss the beautiful golden-
roofed temple, dedicated to Chia Yi, a great statesman of the second
century B.C. It is now transformed into a school, and we saw the
boys drilling; but they seemed an insignificant handful in those noble
courtyards, and there were no signs of proper or even necessary
equipment.
Our time at Changsha was all too short, and it ended very
pleasantly with an evening spent at the Consulate. By this time many
of the Chinese were in full flight, because of the coming Southerners,
and the city was supposed to be set on fire by incendiaries at 8 p.m.
Our steamer had retired into the middle of the river, because of the
rush of passengers clamouring to be taken on board, and the captain
was unable therefore to fulfil his engagement to dine at the
Consulate. We were promised a fine sight of the blazing city—only
happily the show did not come off—from the Consulate garden
across the river. We stayed there in the delicious summer air till it
was time to go on board, and found it difficult not to step on the
slumbering people who covered the deck when we reached the
steamer. At midnight we slipped down stream, following in the wake
of the departing Governor. The Southern troops came in a few days
later, but without the looting and fighting which has so often
happened in similar circumstances.
 Chapter VII
Present-Day Ironsides—General Feng Yu Hsiang

“There shall never be one lost good! What was shall live
as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good
more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven the perfect
round.

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall

exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor
power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the
melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too
hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that He heard it once: we shall hear it by and
by.”

—Browning.

Chapter VII
Present-Day Ironsides—General Feng Yu Hsiang
 China is a land full of
surprises, and at the
present day there is an
amazing variety of
individual efforts for the
regeneration of the country
by her patriotic sons and
daughters. In some ways
the chaotic political state of
China makes these
individual efforts possible
where perhaps a more
settled government would
not admit of them. For
instance, each province is
governed by a military or
civil governor, or both; and
within a province may be
found large territories
practically controlled by
some autocratic military
official, the presence of
whose army is the potent
INN LAMP. warrant for his wishes
being executed. In the
province of Hunan, roughly
speaking in the centre of China proper, is such an area, of which
Changteh is the army headquarters.
Having travelled for many weeks through districts infested with
robbers, where law and order are mainly conspicuous by their
absence, where the land is one great poppy garden for the opium
trade, it came as a shock of surprise and delight to enter a district
where we found the exact reverse of these things.
In 1918 there was fighting between the forces of the North and of
the South throughout this district, and as the Northern forces were
defeated and the City of Changteh captured by the Southerners,
General Feng was sent from the neighbouring province of Szechuan
to re-take the city. He had not only defeated the Southern Army
there, but had treated them in an entirely new way. Feng disbanded
the Southern troops after disarming them, and presented each
officer with ten dollars and each private with five dollars, so that they
might be able to return to their homes without resorting to pillage, the
source of so much sorrow in China. The General led his troops to
Changteh and found that the Southern forces had withdrawn, so that
he entered the city unopposed, though by no means with the
goodwill of the inhabitants. They were only too familiar with the
tyranny of ordinary Chinese troops; for it is not by foreigners only
that they are evilly spoken of, but by all Chinese.
In the two years which had elapsed since then this attitude was
completely changed, for the army was paid regularly and not obliged
to prey upon the habitants for sustenance, the strictest discipline was
observed, and no soldier was allowed to loaf about the streets. The
city itself underwent a wonderful purification: gambling dens, opium-
smoking halls, houses of ill repute were swept away, and theatres
transformed into schools; now a woman even can walk the streets
day or night without fear. A notice of three days to quit was given to
the above-mentioned houses, and the order was no dead letter.
Severe fines were inflicted on traffickers in opium. The streets of the
town became wonderfully clean in another sense of the word; the
General is so particular about this that if any of the army mules or
horses pass through it they are followed by scavengers in order that
no traces of their passage may remain; for as there is no wheeled
traffic and the streets are extremely narrow there are no side-walks.
There are notices in the centre of the streets with regard to the rule
of the road, but this is too recent an innovation to be quite
understood as yet. Everywhere one is confronted with signs of the
General’s determination to raise the moral of the people. When he
closed the opium dens he opened refuges for the cure of the smoker,
instead of putting him in prison, as is done in certain parts of the
North. The patient was photographed on entering and on leaving (à
la Barnardo). General Feng punishes with death the soldier proved
to have been trafficking in the sale of opium, while the civilian is
punished by being flogged and paraded bare-backed afterwards
through the streets, preceded by a notice board stating his offence.
The city gaol is the only one in the country which has a chapel and
the missionary bodies in the town have charge—a month at a time
by turns. As you pass along the streets your eye is attracted by
posters of a novel kind. They are pictures descriptive of evil habits to
be shunned: a cock is vainly sounding the réveillé to which the
sluggard pays no heed; the vain woman on her little bound feet
watches from afar the industrious woman doing her task in cheerful
comfort with normal feet, and so on. In odious contrast to these
pictures are the British and American cigarette posters to be found
all over the country, and I was told that one of the leading
Englishmen in the trade said regretfully that he thought they had
done the country no good turn in introducing cigarettes to China.
They are considered a curse by thoughtful Chinese, and at the
request of the officers, the General has prohibited the use of them in
the army, though there is no embargo on other tobacco-smoking.

A Man of Mark.

Page 158
 Another noticeable feature of the city is the open-air evening
school, the sign of which is a blackboard on a wall, sheltered by a
little roof which may be seen in many an open space. When the
day’s work is over benches are produced from a neighbouring house
and school begins. The General has established over forty night
schools dotted along the five miles of the city on the river-bank,
besides the industrial schools open during the daytime. We visited
one large training school for girls and women, which he has
established and supports in order to promote industry, and to which
workers from the country districts are welcomed. They have six
months’ training and one meal a day gratis, and they are taught
weaving, stocking-making (on machines), dressmaking and tailoring,
etc., and the goods turned out find a ready market. The instructors
are all very well paid, and the work done is thoroughly good, despite
the disparaging remarks of an elderly overseer who evidently had
the conventional contempt for the Chinese woman’s intelligence.
General Feng is a firm believer in women’s education, and has
established a school for the wives of his officers, to which they come
not altogether willingly, I fear. The unwonted routine and discipline
are naturally a trial, especially to women no longer in their première
jeunesse; and despite the fact that he succeeded in persuading a
highly-trained and charming woman to come from the north to take
charge of it, there have been many difficulties to surmount. She
lunched with us one day and told us an instance of this which makes
one realize the situation: a certain lady resented the fact of her
teacher being the wife of a veterinary surgeon (lower in rank than her
husband), and disregarded her continual efforts to curb her feminine
loquacity and make her attend to her studies. Finally there was a
complete rupture between the ladies, and the unwilling pupil
indignantly left the school. The teacher pondered over this and could
not bear the thought of having quarrelled with a fellow Christian. She
determined to try and make it up, so she called upon the lady, who
refused to see her. Nothing daunted, she tried a second time, and
again the lady was “not at home,” but sent her husband to speak to
her. The teacher explained to him all she felt—he was so moved by
her appeal that he fetched his wife, a complete reconciliation took
place, and she returned to school.
 The General has a short religious service in his own house every
Sunday morning for these ladies, at which he, his wife and some
officers are present, and at which he invited me to speak.
Having described in outline the changes effected in Changteh by
General Feng, it is time to try and describe the man himself and his
past life. He is tall and powerful, with a resolute, masterful air as
befits a man who is ruler of men; but his ready smile and the
humorous twinkle in his eye reassures the most timid. He was born
in 1881 in the northern province of Nganhwei, of humble parentage,
and had no educational advantages. He has amply made up for this,
however, having a keen sense of the value of knowledge and giving
to others what was not given to him. The study of English is being
eagerly pursued by himself and his officers, and he will soon pick it
up if he comes to England, as he wishes to do.
General Feng entered the army as a common soldier, and in 1900
was present (on duty), but only as an onlooker, at the Boxer
massacre of missionaries at Paotingfu. This was his first contact with
Christian people, and it made a deep impression on him. This was
strengthened by further contact with a medical missionary, who
cured him of a poisoned sore and charged nothing, but told him of
the love of God, Who had sent him to heal the sick. There is no
doubt that medical missions have been one of the best possible
instruments for winning the Chinese to Christianity, and one cannot
but regret that it is now becoming necessary to abandon the practice
of non-payment, except for the most necessitous cases, on account
of the terrible rise in prices and the lack of funds for the upkeep of
our hospitals. However, it appears to be inevitable.
The turning-point in General Feng’s life took place when he was
stationed at Peking in 1911, having already risen to the rank of
Major. He was feared and disliked by officers and men on account of
his fierce temper, which caused him to strike them when he was
angry, while his wife also had to submit to being beaten when she
displeased her lord and master in the most trivial details. There was
as complete a change in his life as in Saul’s when he obeyed the
heavenly vision. This was the result of attendance at a meeting by
Dr. Mott, and he was assigned to Bishop Morris’s care for further
teaching. The strongest influence brought to bear on him at that
time, however, seems to have been that of Pastor Liu, of the
Wesleyan Mission, who became one of his best friends. It is not easy
at the age of thirty-one to conquer an ungoverned temper and
tongue, but the fact remains that he is now adored by his troops, and
that he has never abused or ill-treated his wife (a General’s
daughter) since becoming a Christian. How difficult this is may be
judged by the fact that one of the finest characters among the
Christian Chinese clergy, Pastor Hsi, says that he found it so
impossible to conquer the lifelong habit of abusive language to his
wife that he had to make it a special matter of prayer before he could
succeed, though he was such a saint. The question of bad language
throughout the army is remarkable; an American missionary, after
spending a year constantly in and out amongst the men, said he had
heard none, for the General has a wonderful way of getting his
wishes observed, and has been instrumental in winning the bulk of
both officers and men to Christianity. He has compiled a treatise on
military service, redolent of Christian morality, which every one of his
men can repeat by heart. This treatise has been taken as the basis
of General Wu Pei Fu’s handbook (a friend of General Feng), who
quotes Cromwell’s army of Ironsides as a model for the soldier’s
imitation, though he does not profess to be a Christian! It may be
thought that the Christianizing of the army is of doubtful reality, but
this is certainly not the case; for in the first place the amount of Bible
teaching they are undergoing is far beyond what would ordinarily be
the case here at home before admitting candidates to Church
membership, and the only difficulty about this teaching is to find the
teachers necessary for such numerous candidates: they are keen to
learn about Christianity. Before baptism they have to submit to a
searching examination of their character and behaviour, and must
have an officer’s certificate to that effect. In addition each man must
sign a statement promising to spend time daily in prayer and study of
the Bible, to seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit and to obey the
teaching of the New Testament.
Nevertheless, they have been baptized by hundreds, so that
already more than a third of the army (and I think the proportion must
be much greater now, as over one hundred were postponed as being