The political censorship of films in Britain between the wars

Abstract

The question of the aims, machinery and impact of the censorship of films can scarcely be described as a subject which has excited much discussion amongst historians of Britain in the twentieth century. The impact of the cinema itself has indeed been long noted in our ‘standard books’, such as Britain Between the Wars by C. L. Mowat1 and English History 1914–45 by A. J. P. Taylor2 or social history such as Britain in the Age of Total War by Arthur Marwick,3 but there is no mention of the subject or even the existence of censorship at all. The specialist literature of ‘film-history’ of recent years has also relatively little to say about the subject. Professor Thorold Dickinson’s An Appreciation of the Cinema4 deals with the existence of censorship and its impact by implication only. Mr Basil Wright, who has been personally associated with the socially and politically committed film ideas of John Grierson, does not mention the subject at all in his massive study of the cinema The Long View.5 The most significant, and indeed pioneering, historical study concerned with the impact of political ideas projected by the cinema in the interwar years, Jeffrey Richards’ The Visions of Yesterday6 makes no reference at all to censorship as far as Britain’s ‘Imperial Cinema’ was concerned.