‘Regarded as children’: The Home Office Responds to the London Workers’ Film Society

Abstract

From the mid-1920s through the 1930s, workers’ film societies met across Great Britain, led by the London Workers’ Film Society (LWFS), and the authorities balked. This activity occurred alongside immense social and political change: the expansion of the right to vote in 1918 and 1928, the General Strike of 1926 and the growth of a consumer leisure culture, not to mention a global economic depression. While members of the middle-class Film Society largely managed to see what they wanted, government officials sought to treat their working-class counterparts very differently. But they found themselves constrained by the 1909 Cinematograph Act and the precedent set by the Film Society. Consequently, Special Branch and the Home Office attempted to curtail the activities of the LWFS through indirect censorship methods including surveillance, customs warrants and legal definitions of film exhibition. Drawing on recently released Home Office files from the National Archives that detail official responses to the activities of the LWFS, this article reconsiders what these activities meant at a time of competing political ideas and class upheaval. This complements scholarship that has mostly focused on the Labour film movement, as these new sources shed light on the complex navigation that government officials had to make with regard to the ever-evolving cinematic exhibition practices.