British Transport Films: Elizabethan Express

At Platform 5, The Elizabethan,

A special express for the holiday season,

Summons its strength.

And the time to depart

Marks an ending for some,

But, for many, a start.

     When I reviewed British Transport Films' production 'Blue Pullman' back in 2021 I mentioned briefly another BTF film, 'Elizabethan Express' of 1954.  And much that I said then about 'Blue Pullman', and indeed 'An Artist looks at Churches' of 1959, could be said of this film.  Apologies in advance, then, if I repeat myself.

     'Elizabethan Express' is a film I've watched many times since I first saw it on C4 - and sometimes, strictly between you and me you understand, with tears in my eyes.  I certainly regard it as a favourite, even if at times it verges on the mawkish.  Whatever its faults, it is, however, a good example of how the BTF could produce a beautifully crafted short film (some 19mins) 'documentary'. I've used inverted commas because this film, like 'Blue Pullman', is really a piece of advertising, of a rather 'Reithian' stripe, making the travelling public aware of a 'new' non-stop express service, 'The Elizabethan', between London King's Cross and Edinburgh Waverley 'over the Tyne'.*  (It was Lord Reith (1887-1971), the first Director General of the BBC, developed what are often referred to the Reithian Principles - a distillation of the BBC's mission - 'to inform, educate and entertain' the public.  The BTF and the wider Documentary Film Movement in Britain shared those principles, but perhaps not so explicitly.)

     'Elizabethan Express' was also an attempt to show that the newly nationalised rail service had put the War Years behind them - years when the railways were run into the ground by the War effort - e.g. the barest amount of maintenance and little if any new rolling stock.  Glamour, and comfort, this film announced, had returned. This attempt was made by the use of 'Heroic Materialism' of a much more potent variety than that on display in 'Blue Pullman'; the crossing of the Tweed via the Royal Border Bridge at Berwick is a marvel.  You could say that the train and specifically the engine - a pre-War Class A4 Pacific designed by Sir Nigel Gresley for LNER - is the star.  The narration describes the engine - The Silver Fox - in suitably heroic terms has having 'the speed of a greyhound and strength of a boar'.  Coupled with this celebration of technology is an appeal to the Wartime collective effort of a sort first seen on the big screen in Walter Summers's 'The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands' of 1924.  In 'Elizabethan Express' the narrative of the journey is interspersed with sections describing the work of all those toiling 'behind the scenes' to achieve the feat of what was then the longest non-stop passenger service in the world.  A slightly 'elite' train service as collective endeavour.

     The filming was quite an endeavour in and of itself, for unlike 'Night Mail' of 18 years earlier which re-constructed the interior of a night mail train in the studio for filming, 'Elizabethan Express' was filmed entirely on location.  Cameraman (Billy Williams) and assistant shared the footplate with driver and fireman.  Those repeated shots of the flank of the train, and (I think) the external shots of the engine in the water trough sequence, were shot just north of Peterborough where the Peterborough-Leicester line runs parallel to the East Coast Mainline for several miles.  But then the documentary film of this form is essentially a fiction of some sort; John Grierson (father of the British documentary film movement) called it 'dramatised reality'.

     Well, that has dealt with 'inform' and 'educate' and now for the 'entertain'.  This is mainly in the form of the narration written by Paul de Saux in doggerel.  An hommage to 'Nightmail', I presume, which had poetry written for it by W H Auden no less.  No criticism of the actors who voiced the narration, Alan Wheatley & Howard Marion Crawford, but it is, it has to be said, a hit-and-miss affair.  Sometimes clunky: 'Watch them consistently filling the gaps in their faces with food'.  Sometimes rather affecting: 'The loud hiss of steam as the train seems to slow to the pace of a cloud breaks the afternoon task and disperses the dream'.  A quick nod also to the composer Clifton Parker who wrote the, at times Brittenesque, score.

* 'The Elizabethan' ran during the summer months.  It replaced the 'Capitals Limited' express in 1953, the year of the Coronation of Elizabeth II.  The Capitals Limited express, inaugurated in 1949, was a Post-War restoration (of sorts) of the non-stop 'Flying Scotsman' service which by then had been 'reduced' to a stopping service. According to Wiki, the 'Capitals Limited' made the non-stop journey between London and Edinburgh in 8 hours, 'The Elizabethan' in 6 hours 30 mins.  The service was withdrawn in 1963.

 

 Elizabethan Express

1954

Editor                    Tony Thompson
Cinematography  Billy Williams
Producer               Edgar Anstey

British transport Films: 'The Scene from Melbury House'

     How can I introduce this rather wonderful little film? Where can I start? For in some ways there really isn't anything to it at all. Just a 15 min collage of images of west London shot in the early Seventies from the roof of a dull office block. It wasn't even meant for general release, but it's a little masterpiece, both social document and lyrical cinematography. Unlike the other films made by the BTF there is no agenda - no sales pitch, no desire to either educate or inform. Just 'pure' cinema.

     Now for a little explanation as to its production. Melbury House, that dull office block, in Marylebone, was the home to British Transport Films. (It has since been demolished and replaced.) As part of the training given by the BTF trainee cameramen were allowed to hone their skills using the unused ends of film rolls; like, I suppose, an artist might use scraps of paper.  These fragments were gathered together and edited by the head of the BTF Edgar Anstey himself, skilfully using Vaughan Williams' 'London' Symphony as the soundtrack, and the result really is something special.  Sometimes poignant, sometimes comic. Voyeuristic even as it captured the lives of local residents - a couple kissing, perhaps making-up, on a urine stained balcony; a woman standing naked in her kitchen. One feels that there is an attempt to say something metaphysical in these little collaged-together dramas. I have a rule of cinema (only the one) and that is simply that (repeated) shots of the sky in a film are a signal that the drama unfolding is to be understood as having universal if not cosmological or metaphysical significance. Think 'Ran' by Kurosawa, or 'Star Wars' by George Lucas. Indeed think of two whole genres of mythic film making: Westerns and Sci-fi. This isn't, I should add, a hard-and-fast sort of rule. Anyway this film repeatedly returns to views of the London sky - sunsets and storm clouds that form a poetic stream through the work. An attempt perhaps to capture all of London life and place it within a context of a greater physical and spiritual order.

     In atmosphere 'The Scene from Melbury House' is not so far removed from 'A Bigger Splash' by Jack Hassan. Both depict a slightly down at heal, shabby London. A low-rise London I have a sneaking admiration for - I say 'sneaking' because for some residents it was not a good place to be. In places it was quite dreadful. I suppose it was ever thus. 

     Here is the link to the BFI website.

The Scene from Melbury House

1973

Editor                    Edgar Anstey
Cinematography
Producer

British Transport Films: 'Blue Pullman'

     I suppose you could call this an example of British Transport Films heroic approach to documentary film making. Not that it was in anyway as objective as the term 'documentary film' might imply. 'Blue Pullman', 1960, had a job to do: sell a new, fast and luxurious British Rail service that linked the cities of the industrial North and Midlands to London. Questions always arise with a film such as this: what is the balance between reality and fiction? What is real and what is staged? Are they real staff/passengers or actors? However the lack of objectiveness is no barrier, thankfully, when it comes to aesthetics, or nostalgia. It is a film I take a lot of delight in.

     There is no spoken narration, the cinematography by David Watkin & Jack West and the score, by Clifton Parker (who also composed the score for that wonderous film 'Elizabethan Express'), do all the work. And an excellent job they do of it. The audience follows the establishment of this new service through from the testing of the first train to that inaugural journey of the 'Midland Pullman' service from the now closed Manchester Central to London St Pancras. A film concerned with materiality (is that a word? - if it is, like heteronormality, it is an awkward, ungainly thing) for we see nothing of the design process. From a mysterious beginning - are we about to find a dead body in the buffet car? Well, the body of an engineer busy at work - we reach a triumphant conclusion in beneath the gothic engine shed at St Pancras. The influence of 'Elizabethan Express' made only six years before is obvious. Though, I suppose, there is only a limited way you can film a train. 

     It is instructive to see, in all these BTF films, how the aesthetics of totalitarian cinematography got re-used in a liberal, social-democratic-leaning democracy, and there I suppose lies the almost inherent contradiction, for do you convincingly create the heroic out of the mundane life of post-War Britain? Another way, and one I think Blue Pullman attempts, is to employ wartime commonality. All classes pulling together for the good of the whole. That sort of thing. But I can't image that to be an easy thing to do, and eventually it became a narrative, attractive though it is at this distance, that could no long cut it. Society was changing, and the speed of that change was only to increase as the decade continued. That Wartime narrative along with that of progress itself came under increasing criticism and rejection. In the specific case of 'Blue Pullman' the issue, surely, was the gap between the cinematic rhetoric and the daily experience of, say, a commuter in the south-east travelling in over-crowded and dilapidated rolling-stock. The film itself fell victim to this when filming was temporarily abandoned after British Rail postponed the launch date of the new service by a good six months from January 1960 to July following problems with the new rolling stock. Sadly, the Blue Pullman service was not a success. The Midland service was withdrawn in 1966, though the rolling stock continued in use until 1973

(02.03.2025) Independent auteur, David Gladwell, was production assistant.  Gladwell is best known, perhaps, for his 1973 film, 'Requiem for a Village'.

Blue Pulman

1960

Director                 James Ritchie
Cinematogrpahy  David Watkin, Jack West
Producer               Edgar Anstey

British Transport Films: 'An Artist looks at Churches'

     We are back in the world of British documentary films, a place that this blog has not visited for far too long a period - the sort of thing that was played in British cinemas before the main feature, and also, I can just remember, aired on BBC2 way back in the late Sixties and early Seventies. That was where I first saw 'Shellarama' and, I think, 'An Artist looks at Churches', which was written and narrated by the British Neo-Romantic artist John Piper. The latter was produced by 'British Transport Films', the former by the 'Shell Film Unit'. Thanks to the BFI both films are available on DVD. Piper was more than an artist - perhaps more of a Renaissance Man - the designer of tapestries and stained glass, graphic designer, writer, photographer, editor, theatre designer.

     'An Artist looks at Churches' forms part of six disc compilation of work by the BTF entitled 'Railways Forever!'. Another three compilations, at least, are available, but for me this and 'A Future on Rail' are the most interesting selections. All of these box sets, however, are very evocative, sometimes moving, and one cannot help but feel a wave of nostalgia. British Transport Films was established under the direction of Edgar Anstey (1907-1987) in 1949, a year after the nationalisation of the railways. Anstey, who was also a film critic at 'The Spectator', was stepped in the British Documentary tradition, having previously worked John Grierson at the Empire Marketing Board. I suppose the BTF's remit was not unlike that of Lord Reith's BBC: 'Inform, Educate, Entertain', as well, of course, as drum up custom for the railways. In addition they made films for other transport bodies such as London Transport. In all the product of that same class and culture that was chronicled by the novelist C P Snow. A somewhat better class of 'product' it has to be said. And one which seems to easily blend both the progressive and the conservative strands of post-war culture.

     Odd really, this nostalgia of mine, for it is for a time I did not know, for by the time I was born most of the best work by the BTF was past, as films made from the late Sixties onwards tend toward the utilitarian and the commonplace. Occasionally they succeed but too often the films lack a sort of heroic quality that can be found in works such as 'Ocean Terminus' and 'Snowdrift at Bleath Gill' - the 'Heroic Materialism' described by Kenneth Clarke in his landmark television series 'Civilization'. In some respects, this tilt towards the banal is mirrored in other aspects of contemporary British film making and in the culture generally. Perhaps it reflects a crisis in Modernity, a loss of narrative. Certainly 'Heroic Materialism' failed to satisfy, failed to make up for the absent God. But it did for a while, at least, supply a common narrative structure. All that said the GPO Film Unit was still capable of producing a film like 'Picture to Post', directed by Sarah Erulkar, that could brilliantly combine the post-war ethic with the visual language of 'Swinging London'. Certainly the BTF didn't come to terms with the changes of the 1960s. Edgar Anstey retired in 1974, the BTF finally closing in 1982.

     Back, finally, to the film in question, and it is a classy production - atmospheric cinematography and a score by John Racine Fricker (1920-1990). We briefly see Mr Piper at the beginning of the film, strolling through an autumnal looking churchyard but otherwise he is an invisible presence. Just his very flat, rather mundane accented narration guiding us through a thousand years of English church history - one church, at least, for every hundred years. Not that architecture over predominates - space is given to the other arts, stained glass and sculpture for instance. Perhaps the choices are not the most obvious, but the film is none the worse for that. Though those choices are mainly from the south west, if memory serves me right. It is good, however to see the somewhat unknown St Philip's Cosham by Sir Ninian Comper included (and filmed so beautifully). The more well-known churches, such as Lavenham or Ottery St Mary, appear in the two 'collages' that bookend the film. In common with nearly all of these short documentary films of the early Post-war period there is a note of optimism - rather misplaced here at that. We have not entered into a new period of church building, or a golden age of church patronage of the arts. Far from it.

An Artist Looks at Churches                                                                                               1959

Producer                                Edgar Anstey
Director/Cinematographer   John Taylor